In Geller’s debut novel, a husband and wife face tough decisions when doctors diagnose their young son with a rare liver disease.
Marcia and Michael Kleinman’s marriage—already sailing on rough waters—hits the rocks when a sudden onset of jaundice sends their son, Max, to the doctor. Initially inconclusive, tests eventually show a rare condition that will likely require a liver transplant. This crisis forces Marcia, the novel’s protagonist, to face the problems in her marriage and her dissatisfaction with life in general. Her mother was once a classical pianist (she recorded a few albums that “didn’t sell particularly well”), and Marcia also dreamed of a career as a musician, until marriage and motherhood sidetracked her. Now, faced with an ailing son, she plays piano again, finding release in her attempts to master some of Beethoven’s most challenging sonatas. Author Geller understands the drive of the artist. “It’s not the notes exactly,” Marcia says; it’s “capturing it. Capturing the music.” A neat sentiment—the difference between knowing technique and knowing music lies in the heart of the true artist—but one that perhaps underlines a problem with this novel: Sometimes it feels like Geller knows the notes but lacks the music. As such, the interpersonal notes—the overbearing mother, the distant husband, etc.—feel over-rehearsed, rote and drained of invention, leading to a finale that flirts with melodrama. Yet the novel succeeds because Geller, a pathologist, spends most of his time focused on a realm he understands very well: the world of medicine. There aren’t many works of fiction that focus so completely—and so devastatingly—on the process of illness: the meetings, the waiting, the diagnoses, etc. All of this is communicated with the cool tone of a great doctor giving a patient the bad news while looking her in the eye.
Medical drama outweighs interpersonal drama in this affecting debut.
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1481762328
Page Count: 290
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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