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K

THE ART OF LOVE

A delicate and exquisite success: Hong infuses real life with the drama and pathos of the best fiction.

A fictionalized account of a love affair Julian Bell conducted with a Chinese woman during the mid-1930s, by London-based novelist Hong (Summer of Betrayal, 1997; a memoir, Daughter of the River, 1999).

If it’s true (for media types, at least) that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, then Hong has hit pay dirt. Her story, as she admits, is based on a real-life event: namely, that in 1935 the Bloomsbury scion Julian Bell (son of Clive and Vanessa, nephew of Virginia Woolf), then a 28-year-old Cambridge scholar, went to teach at Wuhan University in China and carried on a passionate affair with the novelist Ling Shuhua, wife of a university dean. The story is so explicit—both sexually and historically—that Hong is currently being sued for libel by Shuhua’s daughter on behalf of her now-deceased mother (Chinese libel law applies to the dead as well as the living). Legal questions aside, K, first published in 1999 in Taiwan, is a pretty good story in its own right, reminiscent of Marguerite Duras in its impressionistic style and obsessive narrative pace. The plot is as straightforward as any boy-meets-girl story you’ll find on the shelf, but Hong adds depth and shading to the bare bones of the tale by drawing on the background, offering interesting glimpses of life within the happy confines of the Bloomsbury set, as well as under the darker clouds of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria or the Spanish Civil War. The character of Bell, who comes across as something of a spoiled and callow child, is greatly upstaged by the sensual and contradictory Shuhua. And the translation, while sometimes a bit stiff and prosaic (“There was such harmony in their lovemaking now that they could easily synchronize their orgasm”), is mostly fluid and unobtrusive.

A delicate and exquisite success: Hong infuses real life with the drama and pathos of the best fiction.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002

ISBN: 0-7145-3072-7

Page Count: 252

Publisher: Marion Boyars

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002

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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

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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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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