The absence of a formal plot may frustrate many readers. But for those who hear the music of its elegant rhetoric, the...
The enigmatic confluence of memory and imagination is explored with teasing subtlety in this 11th novel from Banville, the Irish author of such intensely stylized fiction as The Book of Evidence (1990) and The Untouchable (1997).
The narrator and central (indeed, only fully developed) character is Alex Cleave, a middle-aged stage actor who walks away from his current play to return to the house he grew up in, vacant since his widowed mother’s recent death. As if enacting his surname’s contrary meanings, Cleave embraces the past (which visits him in the form of various “ghosts”) while simultaneously sundering relationships with the wife (Leah, whom he has renamed “Lydia”) he has left and the emotionally disturbed daughter (Cass) from whom he had grown increasingly estranged. Banville portrays Cleave as a wary egoist (“I am all inwardness,” he muses) who prefers “appearing” as a player in imaginary people’s lives to interacting with real ones. An unoriginal concept, but the story isn’t clichéd, because this insecure solipsist’s uncertain relation to reality is expressed in finely honed sentences graced by arresting metaphors (a new mother emerges from the hospital “blinking like a prisoner led up from the dungeons”) and refracted through an indistinct fictional texture located somewhere between dreaming and waking. Furthermore, Banville surrounds his protagonist with both hazily remembered figures from his past and such quizzical people as the house’s vaguely menacing caretaker Quirke and its “housekeeper,” Quirke’s teenaged daughter Lily, whose identity becomes confused—as much in the reader’s mind as in Cleave’s—with the troubling remembered image of Cass, which appears to fade in harmony with the total solar eclipse that occurs near the climax.
The absence of a formal plot may frustrate many readers. But for those who hear the music of its elegant rhetoric, the encompassing dark of Eclipse may well seem light enough.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41129-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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