For Tillman superfans only.
The first novel in more than a decade from the cult-figure author of American Genius (2006), etc.
“When artists incorporate or appropriate unsophisticated or naïve work in their work, a double consciousness plays that game. Or, to say it another way, the artists are presenting visual meta-fictions.” How a reader reacts to this passage will likely predict how a reader will react to this novel as a whole. Indeed, to call Tillman's latest a novel at all is provocative. There is scant dialogue, little in the way of action, and, to the extent that there’s a narrative, it’s spread so thin over the course of nearly 400 pages that it essentially disappears. There is a narrator, but to call him a main character would be an overstatement, as he never quite materializes as anything more than a collection of erudite observations. He does have a name—Ezekial Stark—and an age—38. Both are largely irrelevant. What matters about Zeke is his vocation as an ethnographer. Once Zeke explains that his "focus on images in, by, and of the family includes sexual and gendered behavior and relationships as understood in those pictures,” we have learned pretty much everything we’re going to learn about Zeke. Tillman is more of a cultural critic than a storyteller, and her latest is essentially a collection of essays on photography, identity, and masculinity. This isn’t scholarly writing, exactly. Rather than presenting a thesis and supporting it with evidence, Tillman makes an assertion, drops a few signifiers—Virginia Woolf, John Cage, the Unabomber, Jeff Bridges as The Dude—and moves on. Readers interested in and knowledgeable about Clifford Geertz, Gerhard Richter, and Jean Baudrillard might find that Tillman has some interesting things to say about their work. It must be said, however, that she has nothing to say about the Kardashians that hasn’t been said a thousand times before.
For Tillman superfans only.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59376-679-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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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