The medieval episodes, like campfire tales, are enjoyable in their own right; otherwise, Davenport’s latest is a mess.
Could a knight from olde England have an antiwar message for today’s British government? Anything’s possible in Davenport’s mixed-up second novel.
It’s 1372, and Sir Guy de Bryan, veteran warrior and diplomat serving King Edward III, is leaving for Genoa on a vital trade mission. Behind him, in the village of Slapton, is a chapel where priests will sing Masses for his soul. Guy believes he has committed three great sins, and the details are buried like truffles, deep in the text. Once unearthed, two are clearly not sins at all; Guy is blaming himself for accidents beyond his control. The knight is almost unbearably virtuous; that’s the view of Sir John Molyns, the impressive and underutilized villain. Molyns is a stone-cold killer, contemptuous of Guy’s battlefield chivalry. Suddenly, vertigo, as Davenport fast-forwards to contemporary New York, where hawkish young Beth Battock, a British government aide, is assuring Americans of British support for preemptive war. Davenport’s penchant for moving between centuries (see The Painter, 2003) is a shame. He’s far more robust in the past. As for Beth’s tenuous link to the 14th century, she’s a direct descendant of the licentious priest who arranged Guy’s masses; ever since, her family has continued to sing them. Davenport is on more solid ground going over the key episodes of Guy’s life: the siege of Calais, the brushes with Molyns, two jousting tournaments for the hand of Elizabeth and his eventual blissful marriage to her. Towering above is the battle at Crécy, where Guy sanctioned the use of cannonballs and inadvertently ended the age of chivalry (his second big sin). This led to the antiwar Declaration inscribed in his chapel, which will in turn, after a series of absurd contrivances, be cited approvingly by the British Foreign Secretary, resigning to protest his country’s support for war.
The medieval episodes, like campfire tales, are enjoyable in their own right; otherwise, Davenport’s latest is a mess.Pub Date: April 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-553-80217-8
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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