Well enough executed, but a victim of emotional excess.
An overloaded love story, set mostly in ranch country, flirts with big issues—parental bonding, mathematical intelligence, and destiny—as a young woman falls in love with a married man.
Sarah Bryden has lived with her grandparents in a small Kansas town ever since her grandfather lost his leg in a blasting operation and she had to leave college. She’s an artist, and when she’s not waiting tables or tutoring high school kids, she paints delicate flower pictures in her room. Meanwhile, she’s seeing local man but she’s not yet over a love affair with a Britisher who left her when she became pregnant (the baby was stillborn). Sarah’s life picks up when handsome John Wilde and his wife Susan—a wealthy businesswoman—move back from California to be with Susan’s mother while they try to raise recently adopted baby Will. John, a mathematical genius, is happiest when working with equations, but he’s troubled by Susan’s attitude toward Will. The baby is sickly and difficult, and after Sarah helps out one evening, Susan increasingly leaves him in her care. Sarah and John are drawn to each other, especially after Susan is injured and Will stays with Sarah temporarily, bringing them even closer together. Susan, now recovered and actively disliking her son, offers John an ultimatum: either Will goes or she does. While he wrestles with this decision, he and Sarah confess their feelings for each other, but a flood creates even further problems when Susan, with Will in the car, gets caught in the raging water. Will drowns, and a confused and grieving John heads back with Susan to California, his heart no longer in the marriage. Meantime, Sarah, pregnant with John’s child, goes to France to look at the art, then stays on. Misunderstandings and surprises ensue, of course, but what’s destined can’t be avoided.
Well enough executed, but a victim of emotional excess.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14629-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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