Accessible, perceptive fiction from a talented writer.
A story collection confidently and intriguingly connecting relationships to their locations.
All but the title story in Israeli author Liebrecht’s collection (A Man and a Woman and a Man, 2001, etc.) bear the name of a city or a country. In the opener, “America,” the narrator describes her mother’s departure for the U.S. with another woman’s husband and his newborn baby daughter. The two girls, allies and enemies, meet a handful of times, but only after most of the parents are dead does a truth emerge that rearranges the entire emotional landscape. This rich scenario introduces themes that will reappear elsewhere: orphaned and damaged children, long-contained anger and pain, family bonds. “Hiroshima” also makes fertile use of a delicate set-up, Idit’s move to Japan when her relationship with Natan stalls. In a foreign city, she learns lessons about another Holocaust and about the opacity of cross-cultural involvements. Liebrecht’s choices of location often carry historical and emotional baggage, and several of her protagonists are the offspring of Holocaust survivors. “Munich” depicts neo-Nazi violence against Muslims, drawing political parallels with Kristallnacht. “Jerusalem” tellingly moves between the present, with Idit tensely returning from Hiroshima to her old home and love, and the past, in which a historical figure gives voice to the city’s spiritual aspect while signaling the imminent destruction of the Temple. A warm and empathetic intelligence informs this book, fluently translated by Silverstein. Only a taste of melodrama occasionally mars its sensitivity, as in “Kibbutz,” which shows kibbutzniks abusing two mentally disabled members of the group. The concluding, post-apocalyptic title story is set in a nameless place where new family connections are being painfully forged and tenderness exists alongside a more brutal pragmatism.
Accessible, perceptive fiction from a talented writer.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-89255-320-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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