Miner does much better with her evocation of place than with her characterizations, which are shallow.
In her eighth novel, Miner (Range of Light, 1998, etc.) celebrates friendship among a group of lesbians in rural California.
Serious, reserved Emily and ebullient Salerno met in a lesbian bar in Berkeley. A perfect match, they’ve been partners for 15 years. Fifty-year-old Emily is a city planner in Chicago, the somewhat younger Salerno a jazz saxophonist. They, along with three female friends, bought a ranch in the hills of Northern California, each building separate houses (in Emily and Salerno’s case, a one-room cabin). Emily has just arrived for a vacation when she learns that Salerno, returning from a gig in Arizona, has died in a plane crash. Emily is devastated, and the novel details her grief. But her loss is transcended by the warm camaraderie of her Beulah Ranch friends. Her first thought is to sell her portion of the ranch (she gets help from her brother Michael, a real-estate lawyer in San Francisco), but her friends are aghast. They love her. She must stay. The reader knows before Emily does that she is here for keeps. The reader also knows before Emily that Eva, the young Latina forest ranger with “the rich caramel-colored skin and the hazel-almost golden-eyes,” will provide Emily with more than just friendship. As an antidote to the abundant sweetness of the group, and in lieu of a plot, Miner describes threats to their idyllic existence: a rash of fires set by an arsonist, obnoxious evangelicals pushing Creationism, loggers intent on clear-cutting. Miner also gets some mileage out of an Indian artifact Emily discovers on her land. In this righteous work, in which it’s cool to be ethnic but not a WASP (Emily resents that she’s half-WASP), she naturally donates it to the Pomo reservation.
Miner does much better with her evocation of place than with her characterizations, which are shallow.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-8061-3814-9
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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