A nostalgic swan song about loss, grief, and unexpected connections.
An elderly widow shares her life story with a Ukrainian cab driver as he takes her from Manhattan to the suburban hospice center where she plans to spend her final days.
Carden’s (The Secret Files of Henry F. Sherwood, 2005) novel opens on Christmas Eve as Patricia deGroot Abercrombie, known as Trish, chats aloud to her dead husband. She also has a thing or two to say to her dead lover. Trish has been living alone for decades, mourning those she has lost, and she has chosen this particular day to travel to a hospice on Long Island. Trish climbs into a cab and asks the driver to take her on a tour of various sites throughout the city before her final destination. The driver, Zhelyazko Kowalchuk, tells Trish to call him Ziggy as he attempts to involve her in conversation. Considering her personal pedigree too fine to warrant talking with a lowly taxi driver, Trish continues speaking aloud to her dead loved ones instead. When Ziggy shares that he has also lost his great love and that he copes with PTSD from his time in Vietnam, Trish is disarmed and begins to engage with him. She offers details about her past, taking him on a romp through memories of living large during the 1930s, ’40s, and beyond, as they simultaneously visit locations that hold importance to her. As Ziggy takes Trish closer to the hospice, secrets from her past emerge, and readers will likely wonder if there is a bigger reason that she has landed in this particular cab. Told in the third person, the narrative shifts its focus periodically from Trish to Ziggy, bringing his personal tribulations to the foreground as well. The story is expressed primarily through the pair’s conversation and Trish’s flashbacks, resulting in a preponderance of dialogue and precious little setting details. The emphasis on dialogue creates a lack of physical grounding and causes the tale to feel more like Trish’s hastily assembled memoir than the novel it is intended to be. Even so, the author artfully portrays the equalizing nature of sorrow through the losses each character has suffered and the manner in which it brings two unlikely souls together.
A nostalgic swan song about loss, grief, and unexpected connections.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64438-389-6
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Booklocker.com
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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