Prequel to Green’s Shadow of Ashland (1996) and immensely superior to it. Shadow told of a brother, Jack Radey, who disappears from Toronto during the Depression and for 50 years is not seen again. Then 50-year-old letters from him begin to arrive; a visit to Ashland, Kentucky, brings up his ghost; and still more letters arrive. Such surrealism takes place here again, with the narrator dying and turning into a black starling who sits on phone wires with other starlings and watches his family members grow and die, observing the deaths of others as well, including those in great fires and maritime disasters. We watch a century of Radeys pass through life; know their houses by street and number; their jobs in a variety of Toronto businesses; their illnesses, children, weddings, death notices, funerals. Martin Radey himself is born into a Toronto family with ten sisters and two brothers. His mother dies relatively young. He stays single until his late 20s, when, after a beautiful courtship, he marries a suffragette and has two children (one is Jack, now the focus of the story). Martin has spent his adult life in the receiving department of Don Valley Pressed Bricks and Terra Cotta, and when his young wife dies suddenly, he is left knowing nothing about raising children. A second wife dies of septicemia; Martin goes to live with her sister and mother, then they die; and, finally, his brother Mike has seven children who marry, have children, and die. The entire Radey family, it seems, is a huge flock of starlings, all dead by novel’s end, largely of natural causes. A phenomenal idea, like applying the detail of Joyce’s Dublin or the techniques of Dos Passos’s USA to a single family.
Pub Date: April 22, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-86672-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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