Peerless Israeli storyteller Oz presents 18 months in the life of painfully self-contained Yoel Raviv, retired from the Israeli Secret Service and trying to escape the ghosts of his professional life and his dead wife—a woman he's still struggling to know. Bedeviled by memories of his wife Ivria, accidentally electrocuted in his absence on business in Helsinki; of his servitude to agency contact Yirmiyahu Cordovero ("Le Patron"); and of an obsessively recurring series of frozen images—the statue of a cat mysteriously springing free of its base; the figure of Edgar Linton from Wuthering Heights; a wheelchair-bound beggar; a copy of Mrs. Dalloway left behind in Helsinki—Yoel reacts in two conflicting ways. Frantic to be left alone, he changes his name, retreats to a new house in a Tel Aviv suburb, and refuses a posting to Bangkok. At the same time, he reaches out equally frantically to his strong-willed, epileptic daughter Netta, about to be conscripted, and to his quarreling mother and mother-in-law, by asking them all to live with him; he also begins a robotic friendship with real-estate agent Arik Krantz and an equally passive love affair with next-door neighbor Annemarie Vermont, shepherded by her oppressively approving bother Ralph. Floating through this tangle of relationships, Yoel keeps telling himself that things will work out, that tomorrow is another day, but he's wrong—as he sees when his mother and Netta's lover Duby Krantz tell him off for his inability to accept people without controlling them, and when he's unable to get forgiven by the father of the agent killed in Bangkok in his place. Slowly, slowly, Oz thaws out his likable, paralyzed hero and returns him to provisional membership in the human race. A meditative third-person confessional of hauntingly quiet power—and a treasure for readers who think contemporary novels carry too much plot.
Pub Date: March 7, 1991
ISBN: 15-190499-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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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The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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