As a quest for identity, Thúy’s work is not altogether satisfying, but her powerful scene-setting makes her a writer to...
In her slim, partly autobiographical first novel, Thúy, a Vietnamese-Canadian writing in French, seeks to make sense through memories of a life straddling East and West.
That life unfolds haphazardly. It belongs to Nguyen An Tinh. She was born into a prosperous family in Saigon in 1968. When the Communists took over seven years later, they also took over part of their house. In 1978, the family became boat people, crossing the pirate-infested Gulf of Siam to reach Malaysia. From a foul refugee camp there, they traveled to Canada. Their first year was “heaven on earth,” and the country became their new home. At some point, Nguyen married a white Westerner and gave birth to twins, one of them autistic. So, you can package these details neatly, but it’s not something Thúy cares to do, preferring a montage to a chronological narrative, a progression sustained by images of family life. Some of the family members make the cut because they’re so colorful. There’s Uncle Two (so named because he is the second born), a prominent Saigon politician and playboy who will report his fleeing sons to the Communist authorities; and retarded, unmarried Aunt Seven, who will mysteriously give birth in a convent. Nguyen’s mother, a disciplinarian, runs their Saigon house, while her father, puzzlingly, is a blank; both parents take menial jobs in Canada for their children’s future. Her husband only rates one mention; perhaps this is because she considers men “replaceable.” (Maternal love is the only love that counts.) Nguyen herself, a silent, self-effacing shadow as a child, slowly blossoms; on a return journey to Vietnam, she understands how her fragile Vietnamese psyche has been covered by the armor of Western self-confidence. What has she learned? Travel light; don’t regret what’s past; enjoy “the unspeakable beauty of renewal.”
As a quest for identity, Thúy’s work is not altogether satisfying, but her powerful scene-setting makes her a writer to watch.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-898-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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