A spare and lyrical first novel about African-American rituals of faith carried from slave ships to a town in the Pacific Northwest, and about the universal healing power of love. Expanded from a story in Sherman's debut collection (Killing Color, p. 16), this delineates the calamities of three generations of the black community in Pearl, Washington, and especially of 12- year-old Raisin, whose young father committed suicide rather than go to work in the local mines and whose teenage mother then tried to abort her with an African remedy of herbs and berries. Born wrinkled and raised parentless by town matriarch Miss Marius, Raisin has one friend in the world: 14-year-old Sin-Sin, who was conceived when his mother, the local schoolteacher, was seduced by a mysterious male presence wrapped in an orange mist that poured through her window at night and that now inhabits Sin-Sin's dreams and stains his skin. Dreams are plentiful here, since, clairvoyant himself, Sin-Sin is under the tutelage of hermit wanga-man Blue, who's resolved to teach him ancient African woodland ways and to make a man of the fatherless boy. But when Raisin's mother, the Gershwin-esque Nola Barnett, returns to claim her daughter's spirit for the dead who haunt her, all hell breaks loose: Blue sacrifices his life to save Raisin from a drowning suicide; Sin-Sin undergoes a bloody initiation into manhood; Nola chooses life over death for the first time; and Raisin, reconciled to her mother, becomes a woman as she grows into her envelope of wrinkled skin. The spirits of the lake and trees surrounding Pearl form an additional chorus of ancient characters who affect the protagonists' fate. Altogether, there is a tedious emphasis on dark souls, dreams, watery wishes, talking trees, and prescient bones and not enough focus on what's for dinner—all this, even so, in a novel of great promise and considerable interest.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-016924-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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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