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THE NEW SWEET STYLE

This inordinately ambitious novel by the Russian ÇmigrÇ author (The Winter’s Hero, 1996, etc.) flies off in so many directions that few readers will be able to focus clearly on its intermittent considerable strengths. It’s the picaresque history of singer-actor Alexander “Sasha” Korbach’s 13-year (1982—95) odyssey in and out of favor with Soviet authorities, pursuit of the good life in America, and lifelong search for a personal aesthetic—a “new sweet style” compounded of abstract universal and mundane specific elements, as was the dolce stil nuovo Dante created for his Vita Nuova. Aksyonov tells Sasha’s often beguiling story in a distractingly avuncular voice that addresses the reader directly and indulges in arch metafictional play with fractured allusions to his own early novels. And the story is heavily laden with commentary: on Soviet paranoia and deceitfulness and the (not dissimilar) rot at the core of American culture, more specifically on the breakup of the Soviet Union (clearly paralleling Korbach’s own travail) in the 1990s. Still, Aksyonov’s ego-driven antihero is an engaging bundle of sexual and creative energies, and the parade of characters orbiting around him—his enthusiastically Americanized ex- wife Anisia, fellow Russian-Americans like Bellovian hustler Tikhomir Barevyatnikov and sexual gameswoman Lenore Yablonsky (who compiles an “impressive record of missions behind the lines in the American sexual revolution”), and especially Sasha’s American mistress Nora Mansour (note the surname) and her father, his “fourth cousin,” department-store millionaire philanthropist Stanley Korbach. They all have their own unruly reality, and help broaden the novel’s scope. The details of Sasha’s several careers—as filmmaker, professor, and “chairman of the Moscow branch of the Korbach Fund”—are also cunningly manipulated to bring the story to an absolutely stunning comic-apocalyptic conclusion in Jerusalem. Not an easy read, or a fully successful novel, but a piquant, flinty book brimming with provocative ideas and characters. Aksyonov’s fiction is well worth the effort it demands.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-679-44401-7

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

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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