The narrator observes that one of the characters “uses language like an exacto blade”—the same can be said of Saterstrom...
A fragmented novel that lurches through the life of the unnamed narrator from girlhood through adolescence to rocky young adulthood.
Early on we sense the narrator’s desperation to construct a meaningful life, but contemporary culture—especially in the Southern backwater of Beau Repose—gives her almost nothing to work with. She grows up (if that’s the term) in a world with no periphery, where amidst the questionable “pleasures” of drugs and adolescent sex (the mysterious “world of doing it”), she drifts from one empty experience to another. She ends up in reform school, which enforces mandatory activities like basket weaving and square dancing. Eventually, her sharp mind enables her to go to college, and she makes high scores on a placement test for British universities, which leads her to study in Glasgow, city of rain and fog (and more drugs and sex). Her course of study is “The Postmodern Seminar for the Study of Interpretative Uses,” in which students create “postmodern happenings in honor of Jacques Derrida,” but this intellectualism also understandably fails to nourish the narrator, who becomes ill in both body and mind, the “meat and spirit plan” showing definite deficiencies. At the end of the novel, she insightfully realizes that there’s a third choice beyond light and darkness, one that “includes light and dark but is not limited to either.” The novel is divided into paragraphs, though Saterstrom orders these paragraphs into a loose narrative framework organized by fragments from heavy-metal bands like Metallica, Anthrax and Judas Priest (“Rock Hard, Ride Free”). Perhaps an even more basic unit of structural organization found here is the image, for image patterns (of Ginger Rogers, of butchering, of The Seventh Seal, of The Blue Lagoon) weave through both the reality and the dreams of the narrator.
The narrator observes that one of the characters “uses language like an exacto blade”—the same can be said of Saterstrom (The Pink Institution, 2004).Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-56689-201-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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
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
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