A dark romp featuring delightfully crackling dialogue and the mental gymnastics of a protagonist so on edge he tries to...
Will Regan, former copy clerk–turned–35-year-old daydreamer, reflects on his increasingly high-stakes encounters with three seemingly disconnected people in Dublin, a place he’s never left.
As the Dante invocation in the title suggests, the trio circulating in and out of Regan’s days contribute to hellish circumstances. An observer who acted for years as the eyes for his blind mother, Regan sees patterns everywhere. He’s drawn to symmetry by the desire to know if coincidences exist or if fate prevails, a conversation that deepens when he befriends brooding priest Ciaran Crowe. One pattern that Regan mixes up is chronology: he randomly weaves together the absurd consequences set off by seeing Joseph Mary Danaher, a bully from his childhood who is now a burglar responsible for killing an elderly woman. This storytelling foible adds both suspense and levity. It’s often Regan’s acquiescence to others that causes trouble rather than anything he instigates. Danaher invites himself to use Regan’s place as the hideaway for a padlocked bag. Regan saves the second of the trio, Chester Maher, from attempted suicide only to discover that Maher, an amateur composing “an opera without music,” knew his dead mother. She was “the first woman to give [Maher] a number of sleepless nights.” Intrigued by the stranger’s memories, Regan begins rendezvousing with him regularly. The third character anchoring this peculiar milieu is Yelena, a Polish woman he thinks of as his girlfriend despite her insistence that they have no relationship. For her, he signs his name to countless documents he doesn’t understand, perhaps because “the Irishman loves his girlfriend best, his wife the most, but his mother the longest.”
A dark romp featuring delightfully crackling dialogue and the mental gymnastics of a protagonist so on edge he tries to silence a yowling cat with poison.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-84840-364-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: New Island Books/Dufour
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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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The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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