A gentle, intelligent exercise in nihilism: Life, Jelloun seems to say with a pained smile, is hardly worth discussing.
In this consideration of the meaning of friendship, desertion and lies become an expression of loyalty.
Mamed and Ali have been best friends since their school days in Tangiers. They discover sex together, in brothels and with their willing but necessarily circumspect peers—girls who cheerfully embrace sodomy as a means of preserving their virginity for marriage. Through aimlessness as much as conviction, they become involved in left-wing politics, and both are imprisoned. In prison, each man saves the other’s life. Although both marry women who are jealous of the friendship, it survives, remaining the main relationship in the men’s lives even after Mamed leaves Tangiers to take a long-term job in Stockholm. One day, without warning and for apparently fanciful reasons, Mamed turns on Ali, brutally accuses him of using the friendship to steal from Mamed’s family, and refuses to ever see or speak to him again. Ben Jelloun (Islam Explained, 2002, etc.) tells his story in three first-person narratives: The first is from the perspective of Ali, the abandoned friend; then Mamed tells the same history, exposing the reason for his rejection of Ali; finally, a mutual friend of both adds a postscript. This structure is employed to depict the delicate shades of difference between similar minds. The tone is placid, at times almost bored. The only characters of importance are the friends, and the book suggests that the ultimate significance of a life can be expressed in a single relationship. In making that relationship humdrum, passionless and lacking in substance, the author has produced a work that may be likened to a long, disappointed sigh.
A gentle, intelligent exercise in nihilism: Life, Jelloun seems to say with a pained smile, is hardly worth discussing.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2006
ISBN: 1-59558-008-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
