Who has the patience for a hero this cloying and self-important, or for plot turns this clunky?
Stolen art, Nazi collaborators in WWII rural France and a larger-than-life guitar-twanging American named Coyote add up to no more than lukewarm melodrama in British romance novelist Montefiore’s second to appear in the U.S. (after Last Voyage of the Valentina, 2006).
In 1985, Manhattan antiques-dealer Misha is shocked to discover that his beloved dying mother, Anouk, possesses a Titian masterpiece when she tries to donate it to the Met, which cannot authenticate the painting’s rightful owner. When Misha’s stepfather Coyote, who abandoned Misha and Anouk 30 years earlier, shows up, Misha turns the aging homeless man away. Immediately full of questions and regret, Misha then sets out to solve the mystery of the painting and to uncover the truth about his own history. He returns to the village in Bordeaux that he and Anouk left when Misha was seven. Until the war, Anouk had been the nanny at a privately owned winery/estate. After the war, the villagers denounced Anouk as a traitor for marrying Misha’s father, a German officer. Witnessing her brutal humiliation caused Misha to become mute. Anouk continued to work at the estate, now a hotel, until the handsome American Coyote arrived. While Anouk and Coyote fell in love, his affectionate attention gave Misha back his voice. Coyote brought them to New Jersey, where they lived happily until Coyote disappeared. In Bordeaux, Misha learns that, despite appearances, both his mother and father were anti-Nazis and that Coyote had not abandoned Misha and Anouk; he’d been in prison for murder. A mama’s boy who has never connected intimately with any other woman despite numerous gratuitous, uninspired sex scenes, Misha finds true love with Claudine, whom he first loved when he was six and who now leaves her husband to return with Misha to America. The million-dollar painting becomes largely irrelevant.
Who has the patience for a hero this cloying and self-important, or for plot turns this clunky?Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-7889-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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