Smith (When Venus Fell, 1998, etc) has a real affection for folk artists and rural characters, but even so her story suffers...
A Brooklyn artist creates a scrap-metal sculpture of a giant bear for a small Georgia community—and, years later, his grieving son heads south to find his father’s masterpiece.
The Powell clan—poor farmers and folk artists—believe that a bear sculpture will serve as a protective totem against the polio epidemic that has crippled and killed so many local children and adults. According to the half-remembered teachings of their long-dead Granny Annie, that is, who was part-Cherokee. Another superstitious relative has a load of scrap metal shipped to the Brooklyn studio of Richard Riconni, an unrecognized genius whose saintly young sister died in an iron lung. Riconni sets to work, using leg braces to create the Iron Bear’s armature and a tractor carburetor for its heart. When the finished sculpture finally arrives in Tiberville, many deride it, but others love it—including the current head of the Powell clan, who even gives his newborn daughter a bearish name, Ursula, to commemorate the day. She grows up healthy and happy on the Powell farm located on (where else?) Bear Creek, playing around the Iron Bear, which her father eventually bought and moved to his land, though at a terrible cost: he then couldn’t afford medical care for Ursula’s mother, who died in childbirth as a result. The baby boy she leaves behind is further afflicted with autism, able to communicate only with the Iron Bear, which speaks to him in the voice of his dead mother. Enter Quentin Riconni, a handsome hunk inspired by his father’s violent death to a quest for the Iron Bear. Ursula won’t part with it, of course—and Quentin falls in love with her and begins welding his own sculpture, Bear Two.
Smith (When Venus Fell, 1998, etc) has a real affection for folk artists and rural characters, but even so her story suffers by remaining—well, improbable.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-80077-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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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