Oates has done time in academia, and the best part of this erratic novel—set among literary faculty at an upstate N.Y. college—are her descriptions, verging on dark farce, of professorial vanities, rivalries, insecurities, and petty tactics: much of the book involves a handful of faculty parties, and Oates efficiently captures the spilled drinks, bored wives, snide put-downs, labored jokes, oblique namecallings, faux pas, and hurt egos that characterize such sloshy gatherings. (At the first party, there's a ghastly moment when the guest of-honor—a great, aged, failing English poet—vomits at the climax of a vain young composer's eager-to-please performance at the piano.) And at least one of the strutting literati here—a self-important prof having an affair with a young teacher's insomniac wife (she's out to save her husband's job)-takes on a real tragicomic pathos in his desperately fawning attempt to win over the visiting poet, who'd rather chat with the folks at the public library. But Oates wants more from her cast than dark irony (which reaches its peak when the old poet bums to death after fiercely shooing the tireless sycophant out of his bedroom); she wants, as usual, fear and trembling. And the attempts here at tortured, soulful characterization are less successful: many of the players have fitful stream-of-consciousness moments, but it is 38-year-old novelist/teacher Brigit Stott, a vaguely autobiographical figure, who carries the emotional weight—in memories of her brutal former marriage, in her half-thwarted attachment to the old poet ("He would be one of her holy loves. She has had holy loves and unholy loves"), in her recurrent fear of being suicide-prone, and in her unconvincing affair with that vain young composer, a preening bisexual. With Brigit, who is made to reach some sort of unwarranted epiphany, Oates turns on her familiar tortured-soul prose ("Her stomach was bloated, hard, her brain was emptied of blood. . ."); but the character remains sketchy and out of place, like a study for some other, more focused novel. A mixed bag of Oates, then—insightful and sharp when it's content to view the academics with a satiric curl of the lip, but characteristically morbid-shallow when trying to reach into their very souls.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0449244571
Page Count: 317
Publisher: Vanguard
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1979
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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