Serious, contemplative, and also slow-moving third from Goodwin (The Blood of Paradise, 1979, etc.).
A contemporary family drama, filled with angst and redemption.
While enjoying a warm Washington, DC, night with his semi-girlfriend, Tucker Jones receives a damning phone call: a fellow parent informs him that a party has gotten out of hand and Tucker’s 14-year-old daughter Kat can be found in the pool house fellating a group of drunken boys. Tucker rushes over, can’t find Kat, confronts a pack of smug teenagers, and somehow becomes involved in the accident that fells Jed Vandenberg. The teenager ends up losing an eye, the Vandenbergs file a multimillion-dollar civil suit against Tucker, the government files felony assault charges against him, and his ex-wife is threatening to move Kat to New York, since obviously Dad has lost control. Or has he? Kat is a good girl, an athlete, barely involved with boys, he himself is happy and successful, so how did he and his daughter get involved in this Jerry Springeresqe trouble? Though the legal implications are certainly distressing (as is guilt over inadvertently maiming the Vandenberg boy), Tucker’s real concern is Kat: the more he insists on closeness between them, wanting her to open up about all this mess, the more she shuts down and pushes him away. The tangled emotions seem appropriate given the events of the fateful July night, but when a few hundred pages are given over in dissection of them, the urgency of feeling becomes lost among the all talking. Though much else occurs: Tucker enters into therapy to sort himself out (and finds he is lonely for love); he considers a possible romance with his best friend Lily, who is married; Kat falls deeper into depression and becomes briefly involved with their housekeeper’s charismatic church, and Kat’s best friend Abby becomes pregnant by Jed Vandenberg. In someone else’s hand this would turn into a big sudsy mess, some kind of modern, therapy-driven Peyton Place, but Goodwin’s writing is too smart for that failing. Instead, it is weighted down by its own earnestness and worthy intentions, offering a sympathetic and labored analysis of all involved.
Serious, contemplative, and also slow-moving third from Goodwin (The Blood of Paradise, 1979, etc.).Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-15-100806-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
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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