Big, ambitious and heartfelt. If it’s less fully achieved than V.I.’s adventures, Paretsky’s fans will probably devour it...
The creator of V.I. Warshawski (Fire Sale, 2005, etc.) tells the story of three deep-rooted farm families in Lawrence, Kan., whose troubled interactions seem to recapitulate the state’s violent history.
The families include the fundamentalist Schapens, in this generation represented by matriarch Myra, her deputy-sheriff son, Arnie, and his boys Junior, a football bully, and Robbie, his favorite target; the left-liberal Grelliers, represented by Jim and Susan and their children Chip (né Etienne), 18, and Lara, 15; and the lordly Fremantles, who were the town’s first family but in this generation are all but gone. Trouble seems to begin with two new arrivals to the community: Gina Haring, the recently divorced niece of John Fremantle’s late wife, invited to live in his home, and Nasya, the solid red calf Robbie’s bred who could just turn out to become the ritual sacrifice necessary for the Jewish dream of establishing the Second Temple in Jerusalem. (Note: Ancient Jewish prophecy states that the Second Temple, destroyed in 70 CE, can be rebuilt only under the direction of a rabbi purified by the ashes of an unblemished red cow sacrificed at three years of age; Christian prophecy, meanwhile, states that the Second Coming won't happen until the destruction of this Second Temple.) Gina encourages Susan Grellier, already reviled on Myra Schapen’s vitriolic right-wing blog for her experiments in organic farming and communal marketing, to join her circle of Wicca dancers. Over at the Schapens, a trio of rabbis keeps checking up on Nasya to make sure she’s still unblemished and worthy of being sacrificed, and Robbie finally confesses his love to Lara Grellier. Paretsky expands this family saga in two ways. She broadens its scope to include contemporary conflicts over the Iraq war, and she adds just enough historical retrospective, in the form of extracts from the diary Abigail Grellier kept from 1855 to 1863, to show that the irruption of Gina Haring and Nasya the golden calf didn’t so much create conflict as expose fault lines that had run through the community from the beginning.
Big, ambitious and heartfelt. If it’s less fully achieved than V.I.’s adventures, Paretsky’s fans will probably devour it anyway.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15405-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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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