Brooding, lyrical, and thoughtful, though the narrative, like Stephen himself, seems slightly distanced from the events it...
The author of The Undiscovered Country (1998) delicately portrays an alienated scion of America’s wealthiest family searching for spiritual solace in the earth’s wildest places.
Gillison, who lived for two years in New Guinea as a child, loosely bases her story on the life of Michael Rockefeller, who disappeared there in 1961. Her protagonist is Stephen Hesse, son of a working-class Englishwoman whom megarich Nicholas Hesse married while he was a student at Cambridge and divorced before their son turned two. Stephen grows up encased in his mother’s angry, obsessive love, yearning for closer contact with his father, who is proud of his eldest child’s academic brilliance but a bit aloof now that Nicholas is more suitably remarried. First a classics teacher at prep school and then an anthropology professor at Harvard show Stephen how an intellectual discipline might assuage some of his emotional needs. He falls in love with an older woman, “the only person in the world who could stop this aching in his chest,” but she sends him away not long after Stephen persuades his father to fund an expedition to New Guinea and use Hesse influence to get him invited, even though he’s less qualified than the other students. “I have found a place where I am completely at ease,” he writes in his notebook. But even among headhunters in the tropics, Stephen never truly shakes off the power and privilege he was born to, as he buys up native artifacts (including the skull of a young man he knew) and browbeats a Dutch diplomat and two guides into taking him out on a boat trip during monsoon season. Yet intelligent, needy Stephen is a sympathetic character, viewed with compassion by the author. Whatever faults he has, he pays for them with his life in an affecting climax that hints death might be what Stephen Hesse has sought all along.
Brooding, lyrical, and thoughtful, though the narrative, like Stephen himself, seems slightly distanced from the events it describes so eloquently.Pub Date: March 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50819-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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