A son's journey to his late father's hometown in Italy turns up surprising revelations in this first novel.
In an emotionally charged work of fiction, the actor and memoirist Romeo (Behind the Store, 2011) tells the story of Tony Romeo, an aging actor on daytime soaps, who returns his father’s ashes to his ancestral home in Calabria. In seaside Lirò Marina, Tony encounters old friends of his father’s as well as a large extended family that speaks as much English as Tony does Italian (not much). Despite his ongoing frustration with the language barrier (“I want a discussion—a dialogue,” he laments at one point), Tony finds his cousins to be hospitable hosts and excellent tour guides, even if he struggles to understand some of the nuances of their culture, such as their sometimes apathetic attitude toward the past. He also learns that his father had quite a storied reputation in town and a mysterious nickname Tony had never heard. As he tries to reconcile himself to the loss of his distant, sometimes-abusive father, whom he never felt he understood, Tony finds joy—and a newfound closeness with his late parent—in his efforts to fix up the farmhouse where his father spent much of his childhood. In the most compelling storyline in the book, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with an eccentric, English-speaking painter named Artemis, known in town as a pazza, or crazy, for goatherding in traditional costume. The two bond over the challenges and pleasures of the artist’s life, their similar philosophical outlook and the immediate spark between them, but Artemis’ troubled past and Tony’s father’s secrets soon challenge their budding relationship. Unfortunately, not all of the Italian characters are as well-developed as Artemis, and Romeo is not quite a consummate writer. Early on, he slips distractingly in and out of past and present tense, and he occasionally falls back on stilted, overstated lines like: “It was beginning to dawn on me that not only was I going to learn about my father on this trip; I was also going to learn about myself.”
An admirable but uneven novel about the importance of family roots.
Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497582736
Page Count: 238
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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