The author of the prizewinning Snow Angels (1994) offers a clever reformulation of a frequently exhausted theme—a shell- shocked Vietnam vet finds that his real troubles begin long after he returns safely home. Larry Markham is one of those characters who could be said to have found their rut. A Cornell grad who went to Vietnam over his father's objections, he's settled back into daily life in Ithaca, where (more than ten years after his return from combat) he drives a delivery truck and volunteers as a therapist at the local VA hospital. Markham was a medic in Vietnam, and his obsession with the war and the lives he saw destroyed by it now stands as a barrier between him and anyone who didn't share his experience: His wife Vicki complains that ``It's like a religion with you. . . . You keep torturing yourself with it. That's what your group at the hospital's all about—keeping it fresh.'' Even when Vicki leaves Markham for another man, he doesn't seem able to make the connection between his inability to get over the war and his failure as a husband. Instead, he begins an affair with his wife's best friend—herself abandoned by her husband—whose mental instability has kept her as emotionally isolated as Markham himself. But before any resolution to his domestic turmoil appears, Markham finds himself threatened on another side—by a patient who becomes convinced that Markham's father was responsible for his mother's death and sets out to kill him and Markham both. The intricacy of the plot—most of the characters have some secret and usually malign link with others that only gradually becomes apparent—could easily have become far-fetched or predictable, but O'Nan orchestrates the proceedings well by providing a parallel narrative of Markham's experience in Vietnam and by refusing to settle all the questions in the end. A credible and moving account of moral failure and regeneration: thrilling, mature, and thoughtful.
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-48192-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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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