This autobiographical first novel delights in irreverence and irony—its politically incorrect narrator refuses to sacrifice his much-cultivated individuality for a ready-made racial identity. He's black, blue, and bourgeois—Ellison's Invisible Man getting drunk with Frederick Exley. Fragmented and episodic, Pinckney's daring narrative begins in Indiana ``on the glossy edge of the New Frontier,'' when the young narrator looks into his future among the ``Also Chosen,'' the suburban answer to ``the Talented Tenth'' of well-educated and polite Negroes. But hovering over the rosy scene is Ivy-educated Grandfather Eustace (``the arch darky''), whose failure at everything, including itinerant preaching, presages his unnamed grandson's own will to dissipate. Nerdy and precocious, the adolescent Anglophile discovers ``the social stratification of being a black-power advocate in a suburban high school.'' But his involvement with a Black Panther splinter group (the Heirs of Malcolm) ends with his purge for ``flunkyism.'' A trip to beloved England finds London as depressing as downtown Indianapolis. College days are served on the edge of Harlem (the ``Valley of the Shines''), where Black Muslims and street hustlers mark him as college boy and rube. His only black friend in school is the flamboyant and sexy Bargetta, who dates only whites. After Columbia, our hero slums on Morningside Heights; hangs out in a working-class bar; works for Djuna Barnes as a part-time handyman. He coasts through a job in publishing; moves to Manhattan's Pomander Walk; attends a Farrakhan rally; and suffers through a dinner party with black yuppies. While he halfheartedly tries to make his way in the world, family keeps tugging at his conscience and consciousness—Aunt Clara in ``the Old Country'' down south; Uncle Castor, the aging jazzman; and Grandfather Eustace in mental decline. Ultimately, Pinckney's unhip narrator embraces art not ideology, loneliness not a lifestyle. Pinckney mocks the racial shibboleths, deftly turns the ironist inward, and scorns his self-indulgence. His voice—in perfect tones and full of timbre—speaks to, not for, ``the black experience'' among those who value character over color.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-16998-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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