A story “ripped from the headlines” and transformed into a bitter, gemlike work of art. (See above.)
The recent school shootings that have lodged in the American consciousness as a recurring dark nightmare inspire a powerful fictional counterpart in Shepard’s vivid, frightening sixth novel.
The narrator is 14-year-old Edwin Hanratty, an underachieving eighth-grader whose studied disrespect for all things adult and eloquent foul mouth instantly remind us of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. “I’m the kid you think about when you want to make yourself feel better,” he ruefully confides. Indeed, everything in his life is either irritant or disappointment. Teachers and older classmates are out to get him; girls simultaneously attract and annoy him. Five-year-old brother Gus asks too many questions. His mom smothers him with understanding, while his college-teacher dad affects the sangfroid of a sarcastic disciplinarian. An elderly “pervert” in a car is stalking Edwin and his best (make that only) friend Roddy (a.k.a. “Flake”); worse, a pushy sixth-grader, Hermie, wants to hang with them. Shepard’s grasp of the roiling, unstable psychology of adolescence couldn’t be sharper, and he leads us skillfully through his protagonists’ embattled days, until the one when Flake shows Edwin his father’s guns, and begins to hatch the plan that Edwin (a dreamy kid whose random drawings express fantasies of theoretical violence) comes to think of as their “Project X.” This spare narrative is fleshed out with deft foreshadowings (e.g., a lamebrained plot to infect their school’s ventilation system with toxic “bug powder”) and mordantly amusing vignettes, such as a confrontation with Hermie’s “enemy” during which Flake and Edwin identify themselves as Ed Gein and Richard Speck. The climax is a swift, stunning chaos of uncoordinated actions and responses, in which Flake fulfills his sociopathic dreams appallingly, and Edwin—eternally the kid who never finishes what he starts—silently despairs “I’m a joke . . . a house burning down from the inside out.”
A story “ripped from the headlines” and transformed into a bitter, gemlike work of art. (See above.)Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4071-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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