No surprises or challenges, but a pleasant, undemanding enough read.
The author of 15 novels (Footprints, 1996, etc.) about women coming into their own offers another feel-good story, here focusing on a single mother in suburban New Orleans who has lived too long in the shadow of her “perfect” sister.
Years ago, Ella ran away from her parents’ Texas home to marry Buddy against their wishes while her sister Terrell made a proper match with an up-and-coming lawyer. Ella and Buddy’s marriage turned into the expected disaster. Only his death several years after deserting Ella and their daughter Birdie has afforded Ella a modicum of respectability through widowhood. This she clings to by sending her mother, the intimidating Agatha, letters full of fantasy upper-middle-class whoppers remote from her modest life as a plant caretaker. A few months after the plane-crash death of Terrell has devastated the family—particularly Agatha, who clearly favored her older daughter—Ella and Birdie visit Texas for Agatha’s birthday. Ella is reunited with her sister’s grieving widower Rufus; long-simmering sparks ignite a predictable though not unsatisfying romance. As the affair deepens, Ella begins to recognize that Terrell suffered from her own demons and may have envied Ella as much as Ella envied her. The story trots along at a brisk clip, and Ella has her endearing moments, particularly while musing on her daughter’s fatherless state, but her unrelenting spunk can prove hard on a reader’s nerves. For her part, perpetually loving, helpful Birdie is too good a teenaged daughter to be believable (or even likable), while Agatha is too bad a mother to take seriously. Hearon’s male characters are more nuanced: Rufus has some edge and a sense of humor, Terrell’s adulterous lover shows generous passion, and Buddy combines a capacity for love and tyranny.
No surprises or challenges, but a pleasant, undemanding enough read.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41038-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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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