Lopsided, thin, whiny novel about young love in New York City and middle-aged widowhood in the south of France: the second adult offering (Save Johanna!, 1981) from the creator of the Sweet Valley High series. Anna Green is engaged to Steven Buchwald and looking forward to a comfortable if conventional life as a rich New York matron when she meets Nick Devlin, editor of the advertising newspaper where she's just been given her first job. Nick falls in love with her at first sight, but Anna takes a little longer—four weeks, to be exact—but soon she's making torrid love with him, while still going ahead with her plans for her wedding. The story of their courtship, her reluctance to give up the good life with Steven, and her 11th-hour decision to fly to her true love is interspersed with long kvetches about Anna's present life in a villa in France. Now Mrs. Devlin, widowed and the mother of a grown daughter, she is lonely, can't speak the language, and feels at the mercy of hostile or dishonest tradespeople. In the years between her marriage to Nick and the present, she's made something of a fortune for herself writing lyrics to the rock songs of Wicked, a male superstar. But now she can no longer write, preoccupied as she claims to be by her grief and by her disorientation in her new home. She thinks maybe she needs to become sexually active again, if not with a man then with a zucchini—there's a slapstick scene in the local market with her knocking over a barrow full of courgettes in her search for the vegetable of her dreams. The real substance of the story—her life with Nick, her motherhood, his slow death from cancer—is largely a lacuna between Anna's tedious wafflings during their courtship, and her equally tedious complaints about how tough it is to get good help, find a lover, and make friends in the south of France. Hard to believe, even harder to care.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59682-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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