Disarmingly simple, despite its hairpin twists and buried secrets: Spencer manages to convey the real wonder of discovering...
A meticulously crafted coming-of-age tale by recent college graduate Spencer.
Tom Banner, at twentysomething, is so innocent that he almost begs to be taken advantage of. A dock manager at a Baltimore shipping firm, he dutifully swallows any indignity that his cretinous boss Steve sends his way, whether it’s sitting through the same corporate orientation film with each new batch of employees or scouring out the staff kitchen to save the cost of cleaners. How is he rewarded? With dismissal, once Steve discovers that Tom never repaid the $80 he never even knew had accidentally been added to his paycheck. Steve even threatens to charge Tom with theft, and the innocent lad panics and skips town. He hides out in Ocean City, Maryland, with Leah Greene, the niece of a Baltimore friend, and waits for his friend and co-worker Conrad Begg to call when the coast is clear at home. Leah works in a bar and is obviously unhappy and lonely. She seems attracted to Tom, but there’s something so odd and distant about her that Tom tries to discourage her—and her uncle Fritz, who is determined to set the pair up for some reason neither Tom nor Leah can understand. Tom takes odd jobs, then finds something more permanent when Fritz’s friend Joe mistakes Tom for someone named Pete and hires him to work on his fishing boat. Tom isn’t a natural-born fisherman, but he hits it off with Joe, who offers him a salary and place to live if he stays on. Tom’s tempted but wants to get back to his old life in Baltimore. Or does he? By now he and Leah have fallen in love—but Tom still has to learn what Dark Secret she’s keeping from him.
Disarmingly simple, despite its hairpin twists and buried secrets: Spencer manages to convey the real wonder of discovering life for the first time.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-880909-65-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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