Kincaid's ambitious new novel of Caribbean life (after Lucy, 1990, etc.) begins with the tantalizing promise of a memorable story about strong mothers and daughters—but then turns into a rhetorical riff on familiar ills of our time. Now in her 70s, Xuela, whose mother died in childbirth, tells of a life irrevocably shaped by a woman she never knew and by the children she herself never had. The idea of a daughter's life being as much her unknown mother's as her own is suggestive with dramatic potential, though here it seemingly becomes little more than excuse for a heavy dose of philosophy on the question of who one really is. Set on the island of Dominica, the tale is suffused with loss and angry grief: says the narrator, ``I came to feel that for my whole life I had been standing on a precipice . . . overwhelmed with sadness.'' Reared for seven years in the home of the woman who washes her father's clothes, Xuela learns to survive by depending only on herself. After she moves back in with her father and his new wife, these are skills that serve her well when her stepmother tries to kill her; and they're equally useful when, attending high school, she becomes pregnant by the man of the house she's then living in and coolly arranges her own abortion. But there's something increasingly indulgent, even cruel, in this self- sufficiency and anger, both of which come to seem more theme-driven than dramatically organic, a quality suggested also in Xuela's rigidly sustained indifference to the man, a British doctor and white, whom she finally marries after first seducing him and then helping his first wife poison herself. Because he's a colonionalist, it's not possible for Xuela to love him, no matter that he loves her deeply and wants to be with her forever. Vintage, tough, cool Kincaid prose, though telling a story that ultimately chills and repels. (First printing of 75,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-374-10732-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
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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