38097766.499 Erickson, Steve THE SEA CAME IN AT MIDNIGHT A sometimes disorienting novel from Erickson (American Nomad, 1997, etc.) weaves together the lives of a handful of people confronting the millennial apocalypse both personal and cosmic. Set mainly in Los Angeles and Paris over the course of four decades, from the “50s to the present, the story displays Erickson’s trademark obsession with underground, unnoticed lives and the ways they are conducted. He assembles a dozen or so chronicles of extremity, the central one belonging to Kristin, who at the last minute drops out of her role as the 2,000th participant in a strange cult’s New Year’s Eve 1999 mass suicide. Landing in Tokyo, she works as a “memory girl,” hired to listen as patrons tell the stories of their lives. (These need to be told because Japan’s collective memory has been evaporating since the Emperor abdicated his divinity in 1945.) Left with some empty time when a client expires one evening, Kristin begins to tell her own story, which involves poverty, trauma, and nearly a month of uninterrupted nudity in an empty house. The house belongs to “the Occupant,” who meets Kristin through a personal ad and introduces her to the Apocalypse Calendar, his own strange creation establishing a new schedule for the millennium based on the idea that the catastrophes that go unnoticed (e.g., assassinations in the developing world) are highly relevant, while the high-profile catastrophes that most of us hear about (say, the shooting of President Reagon) are trivial in the grand scheme of things. The calendar tells the story of the Occupant’s life, which folds into the lives of Mitch, Marie, and other equally alienated souls. In this haphazard collective biography, occasionally powerful epiphanies glimmer amid the cultural junk cluttering the social trash-heap through which these characters walk. Yet the distractingly complex plot sometimes doesn’t even make nonsense. And the taste for a naked young woman’s spiritual rejuvenation during sexual intercourse performed on her as she dangles blindfolded from a rope is, undoubtedly, an acquired pleasure.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-380-97766-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
Categories: GENERAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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