Readers will strain to keep generations of characters straight in a narrative that’s both compressed and overstuffed.
This first novel, first published in Italy in 2006, suggests that every individual’s story encompasses all the family history that has come before.
There’s a bit of a fairy-tale tone to Venezia’s multigenerational saga. It begins on March 27, 1861, the day that Rome was declared the capital of a newly united Italy, in the very poor town of Grottole, where olive oil has mysteriously begun to flow through the streets. It turns out that the screams of beautiful Concetta, in labor for the seventh time, were so loud they burst the jars in the storeroom below. The amount of oil lost would have supplied Concetta, her six daughters and every other member of Don Francesco Falcone’s family for a year, but the temperamental and extremely rich Don Francesco doesn’t care. He finally has the son he has been waiting nearly 20 years for. He’d promised to marry Concetta when she produced a boy, but fate intervenes. A post-unification revolt claims Don Francesco as a casualty, and ongoing political turmoil in Italy, including its involvement in two world wars, will further complicate matters for subsequent generations of Falcones. The daughters marry and spawn families of their own. By the time we reach the 1970s and Don Francesco’s great-granddaughter Gioia (who may have been narrating this family history all along), we certainly understand why a young woman would want “a life completely different from that of her parents. A life in which everything would be invented from scratch.” Yet in Gioia’s world, weighted down by family and history, there is no such thing as starting from scratch.
Readers will strain to keep generations of characters straight in a narrative that’s both compressed and overstuffed.Pub Date: June 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-20891-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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