With wit and well-rendered characters, the author fills her story with keen observations about real life and the possibility...
British author Jewell’s fifth novel (after A Friend of the Family, 2003, etc.) is a deliciously addictive read filled with London oddballs, horrid husbands and romantic destiny.
Thirty-five year old Vince is sitting in a kitchen with friends, fresh from the demise of his marriage to wild-child Jess, when the conversation veers to the first time each had sex. Amid tales of awkward fumbling and comic disappointment comes Vince’s recollection of Joy. They met as misfit teenagers at a third-rate beach resort—their parents’ rented trailers stood side by side—and the two, Joy beautifully fragile despite the army surplus shorts, Vince ruggedly handsome, experienced something close to love at first sight. After much hand-holding and a youthful baring of souls, Vince and Joy have a perfect night of sex in a field, and then through a series of miscommunications, the two are separated for another 17 years. What ensues is mundane life—dreary, disappointing, occasionally brilliant, most often just ordinary, as Vince and Joy attempt to navigate relationships all wrong for them. With a dead-end job and nursing a slightly bruised heart, Joy responds to a personal ad for a man described as handsome. He is not. But accountant George is rather sweet and interesting and enjoys the nightly spliff. And though Joy is not attracted to him in the least, the two begin a pallid romance that leads to a miserable marriage. Meanwhile, Vince has paired up with Jess, a free spirit who’s just a bit too free for Vince’s taste, what with the partying, the ex-boyfriends hanging about and the drug use, with an infant at home. Through the years, Vince and Joy’s paths have crisscrossed, but always at the worst possible time, delaying the inevitable, fated true love. Can Jewell sustain 500 pages of suspense until our lovers reconnect? Can a reader survive this much romantic pudding? Oh, yeah.
With wit and well-rendered characters, the author fills her story with keen observations about real life and the possibility of real love.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-113746-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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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