Mystery casts a 50-year shadow over a Toronto family, until letters out of the past take a middle-aged man on a quest for his long-lost uncle. When Leo Nolan's mother dies, her last wish is to see her baby brother Jack, who vanished into Ohio at age 23 during the height of the Depression. After her death, fifty-year-old letters from Jack inexplicably begin to arrive, placing him in Ashland, Kentucky, and spurring Leo to seek answers. He visits Jack's old hotel in Ashland, receiving a curious welcome from Stanley and Teresa, the elderly couple owning the place, who clearly know more about Jack than they're willing to say. Finally, Leo's wanderings in town take him into Woolworth's, where he meets pretty Jeanne, a lunch-counter waitress whom he gets to know better. But one night's ramble also brings a chance encounter with Jack, as the past and present suddenly coalesce. Leo follows his uncle on a walk, only to have him disappear into thin air; but their walk is repeated each night, until Leo finally speaks to him—and finds himself 50 years in the past. Without revealing who he is, Leo gains Jack's confidence, learning of the young man's affair with Teresa as well as of a desperate plan to tunnel from the hotel basement to the bank across the street. With heavy rains, the robbery becomes increasingly dangerous, and indeed the tunnel finally collapses, with Jack and two others inside. Thinking his uncle dead, Leo finds himself back in the present, but since still more old letters arrive to show that Jack somehow survived, he finds incentive to take care of his own affairs, romancing Jeanne and welcoming Jack and Teresa's secret daughter into the family. Hokey, sentimental, and at times implausible, yes, but with disbelief willingly suspended this second novel from Green (Barking Dogs, 1988) possesses enough quiet wonder and innocence to come pleasantly to life.
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-85958-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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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