The author of Life Estates (1994), among other portraits of women struggling through a Sargasso of ego-entanglements, here tracks a marriage splintering in an agony of deep grief after the death of a beloved daughter. ``A lot of wishes and feelings lay buried in a person, then something like this tragedy comes along and uncovers them.'' So declares Douglas, sorrowful husband of Nan, who narrates here. The accidental death of their 22-year-old daughter Bethany, and then the gift of her heart to prolong the life of a frail Texas preacher, does indeed blast apart the secure ``compromises'' of the 25-year-old marriage, releasing fevered resentments, other griefs, old rage. Nan, who cut short her academic career in paleontology, chaffs against her husband's (deserved, she knows) success as a ``brain scientist.'' She thrashes against the confines of her marriage, her untended desires, her increasingly strange life- -symbolized for her by Syracuse, the wintry city in upstate New York where she now lives, as opposed to the warm breadth of her native Texas. Nan will absorb herself in fossil hunting, while Douglas drifts toward an affair (does he resurrect a desire to have more babies? a ``replacement'' for Bethany?), and becomes obsessed with the man who has his daughter's heart as if ``she still was.'' Healing will take place as Douglas confronts an old savage grief and recovers a closeness to their son. And Nan, turning back from her escape into science, confronts her grief when she watches a transplant operation and witnesses a miracle. A stimulating read, crammed with thorny themes and scientific marvels: fossil ``footprints'' billions of years old; the fluttering of a living heart; underwater creatures rich and strange. Hearon skimps on character—Douglas and Nan are at times reduced by the novel's weighty concerns to lecturing, hectoring shells—but even so this is a bright, involving work, if more somber than Hearon's others.
Pub Date: March 21, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44641-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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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