Just one criticism: The diversity on display does not extend to stories of minorities, which, considering all the talent out...
A rich, dense collection of 20 stories—King has harvested a bumper crop.
Auchincloss, Barth, Beattie, Boyle…the alphabetical order bunches together some big names at the start. The first three stories are entertaining and quirky, but T.C. Boyle’s “Balto” really hits paydirt. In this marvelous cliffhanger, about the forging of character, a 12-year-old girl can protect her beloved father if she lies under oath. What will she decide? Other family dramas also have real bite. The renowned Canadian Alice Munro explores intrepidly the aftermath of murder (“Dimension”). A deranged father has killed his three small children; his stoic, baffled wife visits him in the insane asylum; later, through his letters, she enters his twilit world, still reluctantly bound to him. The late Beverly Jensen looks at a large, loving, quarrelsome family (“Wake”). The head of the family has died. His children drive him through an ice storm to his burial in a remote Canadian village, where festive mourners greet the hearse in an extraordinary tableau. That boisterous affection for the dead is offset by two moving but unsentimental accounts of tenderness toward the dying (Stellar Kim’s “Findings and Impressions” and Eileen Pollack’s “The Bris”). Surrealism is represented by Karen Russell’s assimilation fable (“St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”) and Roy Kesey’s airport nightmare (“Wait”), while Bruce McAllister’s searing story about the crisis of conscience experienced by a CIA covert-ops guy who spreads plagues in left-wing Third World countries is a memorable example of speculative fiction (“The Boy in Zaquitos”). Also noteworthy are Richard Russo’s “Horseman,” an intriguing campus story that’s a subtle illustration of the saying that good teachers teach themselves, and Joseph Epstein’s “My Brother Eli,” a juicy if superficial portrait of the artist (a thinly disguised Saul Bellow) as a bastard.
Just one criticism: The diversity on display does not extend to stories of minorities, which, considering all the talent out there, is troubling.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-618-71347-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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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