Compo follows up her first collection (Life After Death, 1990) of post-punk fiction with 13 more tales filled with bizarre names, celebrity daydreaming, and aimless attitude-copping on the alternative-rock circuit and in teen subcultures of London and L.A. After a short but pretentious preface and an introduction— where Compo gives an unnecessary thumbnail sketch of each story, akin to descriptions in TV Guide—the author fills her pages with riffs that occasionally capture the marginal bravado of young lost souls, but that more often feel too clever or arch and, at times, awfully overwritten: ``When the pop star finally kisses her sex, Chloe feels as if all her insides are shaken loose, and that they float out. She is lit within by uninhibited blackness, her empty stairwell resonant with sounds of joy'' (``Who Is Sleepwalking [And Who Envies Them]?''). At her best, though, Compo allows her flair for banter and oddness to cut close to the bone—as when Sharlatt, a romance writer in ``He Pales Next to You''—admits that ``I can barely be in the same room with anyone else, at anytime.'' At those moments, all the odd nicknames make sense as desperate gestures by generic characters determined somehow to be original. Likewise, in ``Ad Astra per Aspera,'' Holly (actually, Ms. Hollywood Cemetery, ``a poet of, and out of, sorts''), with Surfer Jay, who is reading on her bed, ``Hopes the words will draw him in deep and forever.'' Such forceful moments appear all too infrequently, though in a piece like ``(Don't Quit) Your Day Job,'' Compo sustains a funny satire of gossip columnist Havoc's rush for scoops for the National Intruder. It's as if Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson had cloned a child in a test tube and made her write. Entertaining but finally too uneven and mannered to sustain interest.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-571-19818-X
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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