Some nice historical color and a raft of exotic settings, hobbled by the pedestrian plot and a tiresome contemporary...
Canadian novelist Swan (The Wives of Bath, 1993, etc.) intertwines 18th- and 21st-century tales to lead two young women toward maturity and emotional fulfillment.
Archivist Luce Adams pauses in Venice to loan the Sansovinian Library a journal written by her ancestor, Asked For Adams, about a journey taken in 1797 with the notorious Giacomo Casanova, whose letters describing the trip accompany the diary. Along with Luce is Lee Pronski, the lesbian lover of Luce’s mother; the two women are en route to a memorial service in Crete, where Kitty Adams died in an automobile accident. Luce begins to read Asked For’s journal, which also begins in Venice; Asked For’s father, cousin to President John Adams, has been sent there on a trade mission, but dies suddenly of a fever. Rather than submit to the loutish American farmer her father wished her to marry, Asked For takes off with the aged but still fascinating Casanova for Istanbul, where he claims that his long-lost love is imprisoned in the Ottoman Sultan’s harem. In present time, Luce wishes she could escape from the embarrassing legacy of her mother, an archeologist who controversially embraced a feminist view of prehistoric life that stressed the importance of goddesses. She resents Lee, who broke up the cozy mother-daughter twosome (Dad was long gone), and the contemporary story mostly involves Luce sulking and Lee being overbearing as they head toward Crete. Asked For’s narrative is slightly more engaging; she’s calm and self-reliant, never indulging in the self-pity she’s far more entitled to than stuck-in-adolescence Luce. The parallels between the two tales are awfully neat, right down to the Ottoman manuscript that reveals Asked For’s happy final destiny and also leads Luce to a handsome Turkish translator. The blossoming of affection between Luce and Lee seems similarly contrived to satisfy the author’s plans rather than the characters’ needs.
Some nice historical color and a raft of exotic settings, hobbled by the pedestrian plot and a tiresome contemporary protagonist.Pub Date: June 6, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-453-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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