As always, lots of bang for the buck: much good reading, much of it from obscure sources not often encountered outside these...
The venerable award turns 33 and gets a touch closer to its roots.
Some previous iterations of the annual Pushcart volumes have suffocated under the damp washrag of the writing workshop, staffed with the usual MFA mafia. Here, there are still one too many professors working under the influence of the easily imitated Raymond Carver, with this short-story snippet serving as a representative of the lot: “Frances drinks coffee and thinks about life as a long-haul driver, how uncomplicated it must be. How quiet.” (An academic who visited a truck cab would be surprised at how noisy the damn thing is.) Serving as a useful counterfoil, if perhaps an unwonted celebrity, is film director Ethan Coen, of bookish O Brother, Where Art Thou? fame, who writes of the sorts of things a John Goodman-like character might do with an evening, “nasty things till orgasm grabbed us and we yelled holy hell.” (Take that, postmoderns!) The poetry, as ever, is a mixed bag, including much too long, overstuffed, academic pieces such as Mary Kinzie’s “The Water-Brooks,” but also some fine, more narrowly focused ruminations like Afaa Michael Weaver’s rightly angry “American Income” (“black men know the gold / of being the dead center of things”). Among the nonfiction highlights are William deBuys’s sturdy reflections on the dead things found in deserted woods, some of them put there by the finder long ago; Harrison Solow’s account of the best singer you have never heard, who lives in a tiny village in Wales; and Floyd Skloot’s powerful, hard-wrested memoir of life after severe brain injury. Best title: “Mormons in Heat.” Runner-up: “A Berryman Concordance Against the Silence.” Honorable mention: “Chances Are, Lafayette, Indiana.”
As always, lots of bang for the buck: much good reading, much of it from obscure sources not often encountered outside these annual pages.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-888889-50-5
Page Count: 620
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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