A unique, occasionally heartbreaking tale that offers a sliver of hope.
An automobile accident on New York City’s FDR Drive forever changes the lives of two families and forces a cultural clash between Manhattan’s upper-class Anglos and its immigrant Hispanic underclass.
Altschuler’s (Invisible Chains, 2012) second novel is ambitious in its scope, dealing with both the personal journey of rediscovery by a middle-aged woman and the legal minefields faced by undocumented immigrants. Additionally, it raises the provocative issue of using immigrants held in detention to staff sweatshop factories. The drama begins when Roisin Casey—wife, mother of two, professional manager in a pharmaceutical firm and comfortable member of Manhattan’s advantaged social and economic class—becomes momentarily distracted and swerves her car into a rather dilapidated truck driven by Juan Rodriguez, an undocumented immigrant and member of the city’s working poor. Wracked with guilt when Juan is arrested for having an expired driver’s license and learning that he faces deportation, Roisin feels compelled to help Juan’s wife and infant son. In the process, she finds she can no longer contain the growing dissatisfaction and emotional turmoil that has been roiling beneath the surface of her safe, exceedingly orderly life. The steps she takes to befriend Juan’s wife, Lourdes, threaten her own marriage and profoundly shake her family. The narrative is relayed through the alternating perspectives of the primary characters: Roisin, Juan, Lourdes, Juan’s brother Angel and, to a lesser extent, Roisin’s son, Warren. Altschuler is prone to exaggerating the good, the indifferent and the nasty in her characterizations, but her story is compelling and important. Unfortunately, the message is undermined by sloppy punctuation, which a solid copy edit could easily repair. Throughout the work, for example, the use of quotation marks is totally capricious. Often there are opening quotes but no closing quotes; sometimes there are no quotation marks at all. This oversight becomes even more confusing because characters frequently do not express their thoughts out loud, making it important to indicate when they are actually speaking. In such a compelling story, readers are likely to forgive a few errors, but another copy edit is still essential.
A unique, occasionally heartbreaking tale that offers a sliver of hope.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491810767
Page Count: 222
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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