—Wendy Smith
I’d better confess up front: I have always disliked Madame Bovary. I read it in English in high school, in French in college, and both times I was repelled by what I saw as Gustave Flaubert’s (1821–80) contempt for his characters. I couldn’t warm up to a novel that so mercilessly depicted its heroine—and almost everyone around her—as shallow, ignorant, selfish and greedy. Flaubert’s famous declaration, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” must be an example of his celebrated irony, I thought; his cold, clinical narration demonstrated not a shred of empathy.
Granted, someone whose favorite author was Charles Dickens was not necessarily the best audience for his considerably less sentimental French contemporaries. But I adored Stendhal and Balzac, also read in college, whose sardonicism was tempered by affection for at least some of their characters. Flaubert, I concluded after my second try, was one of those savage artists, like Stanley Kubrick, that I just didn’t get. Over the years, however, I realized that, although a masterpiece doesn’t change, people do, and you can grow to appreciate works of art that once seemed antipathetic. Kubrick has become one of my favorite filmmakers, for example, and when Lydia Davis’s new translation of Madame Bovary came my way, I thought I might find myself savoring Flaubert’s ruthless detachment as I had come to enjoy the black humor of Dr. Strangelove. Well, kind of. Davis, herself an acclaimed short-story writer as well as a distinguished translator, does a brilliant job of capturing Flaubert’s diamond-hard style. I don’t remember which earlier English version I read, but I do remember that it seemed antiquated as well as unpleasant. Davis’ English prose has precisely the qualities she notes that Flaubert was striving for in French; it is “clear and direct, economical and precise.” This translation reminds you what an aggressively modern writer Flaubert is: suspicious of all received wisdom, infuriated by any value system—Catholicism, rationalism—that willfully ignores the world as it really is. Sentences I had missed before now jumped out at me: “A man, at least, is free…but a woman is continually thwarted.” I still didn’t believe Flaubert much liked silly, sensual Emma Bovary, but I could see that he thoroughly understood the society that produced her. Did I like Madame Bovary better this time around? Not really, but I admired it much more. Flaubert’s courageous refusal to pander to our need for sad stories to be softened by reassuring morals, or at least tragic grandeur, ages very well indeed. He won’t lie, and he makes it very difficult for us to lie to ourselves. I’d still rather be reading Bleak House, but I get it.
—Wendy SmithPub Date: Sept. 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02207-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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