The premise is that women should know more joy in their lives, but this hollow novel is a joyless chore.
Seattle divorcée hopes surf lessons will be a solution to her midlife crisis.
When they divorced, Jackie Laurens’s husband got the vacation house in Palm Springs and a hot young girlfriend. Jackie got the kids and a mega-dose of bitterness. She works as an interior designer, a job that requires her to coddle affluent clients during their outrageous shopping sprees. In her free time, Jackie and her friends gripe about their empty lives and the endless familial obligations that take up so much time. It’s a stretch to feel pity for this privileged crew of heavily caffeinated and flawlessly highlighted ladies. As she nears her 40th birthday, Jackie surmises that her existence is shallow and that she is owned by her possessions. The solution to her malaise is decidedly uninspired—on a quest to simplify her life and find true happiness she books a luxurious getaway to Hawaii. Her search leads her to Kai, a surf instructor. This surfer boy leads a life free from guilt and expectations. Kai provides Jackie with a little spiritual guidance and a lot of steamy sex. Jackie is drawn to his live-for-today philosophy. It doesn’t hurt that this feel-good guru happens to be smoking-hot and ten years younger. The two lovers carry on a long-distance romance that shocks Jackie’s friends and her ex-husband. Despite their disapproval, Jackie continues to see Kai—he makes her feel sexy, young and full of potential, but the impracticalities of the relationship eventually wear Jackie down. She talks a big game about embracing life, but she’s pitiful when it comes to putting her words into action. In the hands of Porter (The Frog Prince, not reviewed), the plight of the middle-aged woman is bleak. The book reads like a rough draft of a memoir, lacking polish and nuance. The ruminations of the heroine are monotonous and the ending is as subtle as a Lifetime made-for-TV movie.
The premise is that women should know more joy in their lives, but this hollow novel is a joyless chore.Pub Date: July 13, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-69726-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: 5 Spot/Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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
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