Quite a concept: A nice teenager. Parents will be relieved, but fiction without conflict makes little impression.
Weisberg’s debut chronicles a high school sophomore’s life in the first-person, with obvious echoes of The Catcher in the Rye.
Jeremy Reskin, however, is no Holden Caufield. He’s quite sweet, for starters; rather than acidly appraising everyone he knows as “phony,” he’s more likely to tell us that the handsome boy on the baseball team is “a solid good guy. Even in the halls he’s nice to people.” Jeremy plays soccer and fits in pretty well. Though in the fall he hangs out with a group of rebels, he won’t smoke pot with them (“I felt like saying, ‘Sorry I don’t want to kill all my brain cells and probably get arrested some day’”), and he seems better suited to the popular clique that takes him up later in the school year. Sure, he has to settle for just being friends with gorgeous new girl Renee Shopmaker (he finally gets high with her and her hip art-dealer uncle), but second-most-gorgeous Lenea Vovich doesn’t seem like such a comedown to make out with after the prom. Jeremy actually likes his hometown, Hutch Falls, New Jersey (“It has many of the advantages of the city like restaurants and culture but also has low crime and other problems like dirt”), and his parents may annoy him but Mom can really cook and Dad’s kind of an endearing old holdout against the consumer culture Jeremy can’t be bothered to reject. Our hero’s grades aren’t so hot, he spends a lot of time commenting on girls’ Breasts (always capitalized), and he occasionally uses the F-word, but he’s basically a good kid who does a certain amount of growing up in tenth grade: “I learned many lessons like be yourself and let your heart shine.” Nothing wrong with that, but nothing very dramatic about it, either.
Quite a concept: A nice teenager. Parents will be relieved, but fiction without conflict makes little impression.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50584-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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