Here and there, A Desert in Bohemia provokes and moves. But it’s a novel that ought to have had a much sharper edge:...
Well-known for both her YA and adult fiction (The Serpentine Cave, 1997, etc.), Walsh paints her most crowded canvas yet in this ambitious tale of two countries—one real, one invented—in the wake of WWII and through the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1990.
Fictional Comenia (an alternative Czechoslovakia, whose natives in fact speak Czech) is the primary theater for the story’s operations, which exfoliate from the ousting of Count Michael Blansky from his ancestral castle (by Communist “revolutionaries”) and the emigration of Blansky’s neighbor, the tradesman Frantisek, to England. Walsh focuses in turn on nine individuals variously affiliated with these two principals and afflicted by their country’s 40-year experience of Communist domination. They include the Count’s distracted sister Anna, a victim of the war for long afterward; Hedva, the villager whose avaricious resentment of her “betters” makes her all but indistinguishable from their country’s oppressors; Blansky’s son Pavel, another emigrant who becomes fully anglicized in the sanctuary provided by his father’s wealth, and Pavel’s daughter Kate, drawn compulsively back toward Comenia by her love for her distant cousin Tomas; and Eliska, a hopeful young woman both matured and compromised by her infatuation with Jiri, a fiery Communist ideologue. Walsh works hard, and occasionally to powerful effect, in demonstrating how these and other characters are shaped and limited by exterior circumstance. Unfortunately, the contrived manner in which most of them (more than a little unbelievably) prevail suggests that her allusive title (from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale) all too accurately forecasts romance-like patterns and resolutions in a place that never existed.
Here and there, A Desert in Bohemia provokes and moves. But it’s a novel that ought to have had a much sharper edge: altogether, a disappointing successor to the better of Walsh’s books for grownups.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26263-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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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