Credible characterization is the biggest casualty of this slight, depressing, issue-driven second novel. Senna covered this...
Adrift in New York, a young woman falls into the clutches of a predatory coworker.
It all seemed so promising. Our nameless narrator arrives in the city from California to start her first job with a general-interest magazine. She has a newly minted degree and a prestigious journalism fellowship. Soon enough she meets a sweetly sad young guy on the subway and moves in with him. All goes well until Andrew takes her to meet his friends, WASPy Andover grads like himself. They make crass, racist remarks, and Andrew’s girl retreats to the bathroom. She has a secret, you see: she’s biracial, though she can pass for white when she chooses. Disenchanted with Andrew (how come they’d never discussed her family?), she moves to a Brooklyn sublet; it has bad vibes, but the rent and space are right. She was referred by coworker Greta Hicks, a badly dressed older woman in a low-level job so pathetically eager for attention you’d think a smart cookie like our narrator would avoid her like the plague. But the author needs to hook them up because Greta, also of mixed race, is the vehicle she uses to give the issue a complete workout. Once the journalist has accepted Greta’s overtures, there’s no escaping her; only when Greta disparages the young woman’s parents does she realize how “bilious” her putative friend can be. Greta’s behavior becomes truly bizarre once the narrator starts dating a black artist. She spies on them from behind parked cars, then falls apart on the job and has to be removed from the building by security guards as she screams curses. The text closes with a melodramatic flourish on the roof of that Brooklyn apartment building.
Credible characterization is the biggest casualty of this slight, depressing, issue-driven second novel. Senna covered this ground much more convincingly in her award-winning debut (Caucasia, 1998).Pub Date: May 10, 2004
ISBN: 1-57322-275-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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
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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