A short, funny, and oddly engrossing tale about a man looking for a woman.
In this comic novel, a librarian searches for the potential love of his life while on a cross-country road trip.
After years of loneliness, Dennis Dunkle reluctantly joins the dating site Amorous After Fifty to look for love. There, he gets pinged by Denise Dunedin, “only because she was also from Saint Plato—although not the New Jersey Saint Plato where Dennis has spent most of his life but the North Dakota one, a place he hadn’t heard of since grade school, when fourth-graders in the two Saint Platos wrote letters back and forth.” But it isn’t long before Dennis realizes that Denise is the woman he’s meant to spend the rest of his life with. That’s why, when she invites him to come live with her and her cat, Tuffy, in North Dakota, he abruptly quits his job as the librarian at Saint Plato Community College; packs his own cat, Sebastian, into his weathered Chrysler Cruiser; straps a toilet to the roof (Denise’s is broken); and heads out on a hastily planned road trip across the continent. When he reaches North Dakota, however, he finds a note saying that Denise has run off with another man—a man from Saint Plato, Alabama. After spending a night in her house, Dennis gets a call from Denise asking him to meet her in that third Saint Plato. She made a mistake, she claims, and she’s willing to marry Dennis if he just comes to Alabama. Dennis does and is informed that he’s just missed her. There’s another clue left for him, another promise, another destination—but as Dennis quickly learns, actually getting to Denise is much harder than driving to any one point on the map. Simms’ (The Stars of Axuncanny, 2006) rapid prose is full of detail and cartoonish humor, as when Dennis remembers how his mother despised him and his affection for felines: “The more she hated cats, the more she hated Dennis, although she already hated him a lot. She tried to poison him once, he was three, but the hot dog smelled funny to him. New type of hot dog. Eat! she demanded.” There’s a bit of 1990s nihilism underwriting the book’s worldview, but it never gets too desperate or ceases with the one-liners. The novel’s premise is unbelievable and yet also completely tenable given the slanted logic of the world the author creates. Real human relationships have the same push and pull as Dennis and Denise’s, even if they usually don’t require so many road trips, and it’s fairly easy to sympathize with the protagonist’s quixotic mission. Even Denise manages to feel less like a villain than an intriguing mystery caught up in her own equally quixotic whirlwind. The story becomes progressively weirder without losing its buoyant tone, and despite the satirical edge, readers should come to truly care for Dennis and wish him success in his quest.
A short, funny, and oddly engrossing tale about a man looking for a woman.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60489-215-4
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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