A comic call for greatness in a mediocre era.
The Prince and Princess of Wales make a royal cock-up of the monarchy and as penance are sent on a daffy mission—to conquer America.
On the face of it, Helprin (Memoir From Antproof Case, 1995, etc.) is just about the least likely to produce a slaphappy comedy, yet that’s exactly what he’s done here, starting in embarrassing disaster, zooming through epic travels and ending in glorious redemption. The story imagines what would have happened were Charles and Diana (the barely fictionalized heroes) still a going concern, and had the powers-that-be given them a stern talking to about embarrassing the hell out of the royal family, then sent them on a self-improvement quest. After a beginning that lays bit too much groundwork but thoroughly illustrates how bad at being royal Freddy (insanely bright and well-read but goofy-looking and utterly impervious to common sense) and Fredericka (gorgeous and close to brilliant, but shallow to the point of nonsentience) are, Helprin sets up a surreal episode providing the two of them a murkily described mission (to retake America for the Empire, or something) designed by a man who just may be the incarnation of Merlin. It hardly matters that the story stops making a whole lot of sense after about the first 50 pages, however, given what a lively romp Helprin makes of the whole affair, packing it full of vaudevillian wordplay and rapturous flights of fanciful prose as Freddy and Fredericka stumble through the baffling land of America—initially confused and ultimately elated. The tale begins to lose some steam when the royal couple (after stints as manual laborers, dentists and forest-fire watchers) ends up working on a presidential campaign and Helprin starts to lay on the Tory politics with an unusually (for him) thick trowel. Even in the midst of some structural clumsiness, though, he frequently astounds with the freshness of voice and the oddly soaring majesty of this admittedly silly and inconsequential fable.
A comic call for greatness in a mediocre era.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-59420-054-8
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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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BOOK REVIEW
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