Vintage Smith, of a body and bouquet that even Bruce would appreciate.
Further adventures of the inhabitants of the Edinburgh townhouse that provided the primary setting for this novel's beguiling predecessor, 44 Scotland Street (2005).
Its 105 brief chapters (again, originally published as daily installments appearing in The Scotsman newspaper) reveal a passel of irresistibly eccentric characters, comprising a spectrum of humanity that ranges from embattled innocence through romantic befuddlement to the fringes of contented old age. University student Pat MacGregor embraces the brisk energies of Edinburgh, but not necessarily the attentions of an attractive bloke who casually invites her to a “nudist picnic.” Her flatmate, absurdly handsome and narcissistic Bruce, foresees prosperity as owner of a trendy wine shop, but manages as usual to overestimate both his own charms and his friends’ tolerance levels. Art gallery owner Matthew resolves to protect his widowed father Gordon’s wealth from an amiable “gold-digger”—with astonishingly unexpected results. In the best sequence, six-year-old prodigy Bertie seeks the strength to resist his mother Irene’s soul-cramping progressive educational scheme. Bertie’s determination to become a real boy is conveyed with impressive pathos, as is the “education” (so to speak) of his hitherto passive father, Stuart, who learns at last to assert himself, and foil Irene’s micromanaging. Smith is a master of juxtaposition, and the considerable pleasures this novel offers are diluted only by a rather more frequent recourse to omniscient authorial commentary than was employed in 44 Scotland Street, and by excessive space given to two comparatively uninteresting characters. Sprightly cosmopolitan dowager Domenica Macdonald is an unhappy fusion of Muriel Spark and Auntie Mame. And in successive excerpts from conservative prig Ramsey Dunbarton’s preening memoirs, Smith manages only to make a suffocating bore . . . well, suffocatingly boring. But they are exceptions in a winning human comedy redeemed and energized by its author’s manifest affection for even the silliest of his creations.
Vintage Smith, of a body and bouquet that even Bruce would appreciate.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-27597-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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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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