Cunningham (At Home at the End of the World, 1990) adds a gay spin to the dysfunctional family genre with a novel that typically blames Mom and Dad, especially Dad, for everything that goes wrong. Moving through time with the speed of a spinning calendar in an old movie, Cunningham takes the Stassos family from 1935 to 2035, when Jamal, the only surviving grandson, scatters the ashes of Uncle Will Stassos and his lover Harry on the ocean. In between, the Stassoses experience all the psychic and physical ills that afflict the American family in the late 20th century—ills that, with few exceptions (AIDS being the rare one), are caused by the family itself, beginning in Greece with the beatings eight-year-old Constantine Stassos receives from his father. As soon as he can, Constantine flees to the US, where, in 1949, he meets Mary, daughter of Italian immigrants. The two soon marry; three children, Susan, Billy, and Zoe are born; and a lucky meeting with a fellow Greek, also working in construction, leads to affluence and middle- class respectability—but not to happiness, as the family rapidly falls apart. Mary increasingly avoids Constantine, who in turn seeks comfort from adolescent Susan, who as soon as possible marries Todd, whose major fault seems to be that he's decent, works hard, and wants to help others. Billy fights with his father, changes his name to Will, and comes out of the closet. Baby Zoe heads to New York, where she takes drugs, hangs out with Drag Queen Cassandra (the only credible character here), and bears Jamal, whose father is an African-American. Mary and Constantine divorce, but life won't get much better for them or their kids. Only Will will find true love. Stock characters and equally stock situations do little to help a breathless tale that, despite its gay sympathies, is just an old-fashioned melodrama in contemporary drag. (First printing of 75,000; Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-18113-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.
Passion, friendship, heartbreak, and forgiveness ring true in Lovering's debut, the tale of a young woman's obsession with a man who's "good at being charming."
Long Island native Lucy Albright, starts her freshman year at Baird College in Southern California, intending to study English and journalism and become a travel writer. Stephen DeMarco, an upperclassman, is a political science major who plans to become a lawyer. Soon after they meet, Lucy tells Stephen an intensely personal story about the Unforgivable Thing, a betrayal that turned Lucy against her mother. Stephen pretends to listen to Lucy's painful disclosure, but all his thoughts are about her exposed black bra strap and her nipples pressing against her thin cotton T-shirt. It doesn't take Lucy long to realize Stephen's a "manipulative jerk" and she is "beyond pathetic" in her desire for him, but their lives are now intertwined. Their story takes seven years to unfold, but it's a fast-paced ride through hookups, breakups, and infidelities fueled by alcohol and cocaine and with oodles of sizzling sexual tension. "Lucy was an itch, a song stuck in your head or a movie you need to rewatch or a food you suddenly crave," Stephen says in one of his point-of-view chapters, which alternate with Lucy's. The ending is perfect, as Lucy figures out the dark secret Stephen has kept hidden and learns the difference between lustful addiction and mature love.
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6964-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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