A bittersweet collection of 12 taut, beautifully written stories about both the modern Irish who have scattered and those still clinging to their homeland, by the author of the well-received novel Songdogs (1995). Wide in range and scope, these disparate tales are grounded in telling, evocative details. ``The light is like an old fisherman in a yellow rain-slicked coat,'' muses a young Irish immigrant to San Francisco in ``Breakfast For Enrique,'' putting much of his life aside so that he can be with his lover, now dying of AIDS. Many of these pieces have a similarly grim backdrop, but in each there are characters who persevere, demonstrating a plucky will that often brings them into the realm of the gently fantastic. In the moving ``Cathal's Lake,'' a live swan miraculously appears on a farmer's land each time someone is killed in Irish factional violence; soon his pond is crammed solid with the beautiful white birds. In the title story, the women of a small Irish town where the ``children have begun their drift'' gather at the riverbank to fish for sons to replace those who have already gone away for good. Several stories are heartbreaking in the way McCann illuminates how the damaged cope. In ``A Basket Full of Wallpaper,'' a Japanese survivor of Hiroshima moves to a small Irish village and compulsively wallpapers his cottage over and over, creating an ever-thickening insulation against the maddening world. And in ``Around The Bend and Back Again,'' a young woman in a mental institution creates an elaborate plan to return to her childhood home, an old railroad caboose that her father used to pretend he could drive through the stars. The apocalyptic ending of this tale (as with many others in the collection) is disquieting, yet strangely uplifting. A powerful, memorable collection with arresting images, unique characters—and voices that linger.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-4106-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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
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