When all is said and done, Mr. Amis and his readers should all be ready to make voluntary contributions to the Euthanasia Society although there are no suggestions to that effect here. This is a mercifully shorter book than the process of old age and dying and also a very literal view from the bottom — scatological beyond the failure of man's functions in their most obvious orifices — funny only to the degree which you can overlook discomfort — at best acute in its projection of the worst of life which is yet to come. Grin or grimace if you will. The demise en scene is something called Tuppeny-hapenny Cottage managed — as efficiently as possible — by Adela Bastable who at 71 has only a gastric ulcer to contend with. Her brother Bernard has a game leg and a rotten character assisted no doubt by the fact that he has a fatal cancer (the others don't know this). And then there's Marigold, Adela's dear friend, becoming more and more forgetful — Marigold who has her own version of the spoken language which includes "idionyms" like "drinkle-pinkle" or "kiddle-widdle" which is certainly sicky-icky. And Shorty, once Bernard's dear, dear friend, who does the housework when he's not altogether loaded, and a stroke-bound professor of Central European History. Their days are briefly cheered by two visits (Adela's grandchildren) rather than the local doctor who doesn't know what to say to any of them as he makes his dismal rounds. Ail prefatory to the calamities at the close — willed and accidental. One of the self-defeating aspects of Mr. Amis' book — if it is to be a commentary on the incompetence-incontinence of old age — is that he has gathered together such an unsightly group of characters who must easily have been as unattractive at thirty or forty or fifty.
Pub Date: Sept. 25, 1974
ISBN: 0140041516
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1974
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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