An intelligent homage short on effective narrative impetus.
First novel from a popular English TV personality: a tale committed to uncovering an overlooked corner of WWII history: the treatment of Jewish refugees by the British.
Concerned to pay tribute to the experience of those who survived, as well as expose the dominant U.K. attitude to the suffering of the Jews, Baddiel (Time for Bed, 1996, etc.) does his best work in re-creating the atmosphere of the early war years in England. Isaac Fabian, his wife Lulu and daughter Rebekka find themselves in Cambridge in 1940, having managed to escape Hitler’s Germany. Isaac, the son of a rabbi, is an avowed communist who broke away from his family to marry an Aryan. That marriage is now tested by the privations of life as enemy aliens, forbidden to own maps or radios or to travel, and offered only menial work. As Britain’s war effort falters, the decision is made to remove the majority of German refugees to an internment camp on the Isle of Man. Isaac is sent, but not Lulu. Baddiel provides perspective on the establishment attitude—its innate anti-Semitism and belief that the Jews “brought a certain amount of their woe upon themselves”—via the character of June Murray, a translator working for Special Operations, who suspects the atrocities in Germany are far worse than commonly understood. June decides to visit the camp and interview its inmates, including Isaac, with whom she has a brief affair. Isaac’s guilt, after sleeping with June and involving himself in a failed attempt by a group of Jews to murder a Nazi in their midst, leads him to volunteer to be shipped to the colonies. The ship is sunk by a U-boat, but we learn, in an awkward final section at Auschwitz in 2000, that Isaac survived and returned, altered, to Lulu. His testimony to June, giving her exactly the details of imminent genocide she sought, was a lie, woven from other people’s experiences—but proved to be horribly prescient.
An intelligent homage short on effective narrative impetus.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-076582-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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