An experimental multimedia hymn about delving into one’s self, seeking love without labels.
A young man explores his sexuality while the Hindu gods play out their long drama throughout his life.
Getting it on isn’t easy for the most grounded of young people, let alone a gender-conflicted queer boy growing up in the wilds of Canada at a time when “You’re gay!” was hurled as the most hurtful of insults. Composed by multihyphenate pop star Shraya (God Loves Hair, 2011), this fable is punctuated by Biesinger's lurid illustrations of Hindu deities like Pavarti, Vishnu and Ganesha, who also figure prominently in the narrative. The young man who drives the story is struggling with his body, his mind, his sexuality and his self-esteem. Unfortunately, Shraya is often imprecise. One of the narrator’s friends is dubbed “The Only Other Gay.” Eventually, the young man meets “She,” a girl with whom he almost accidentally starts a relationship. Studded with early 1990s pop-culture references, the novel sets the narrator’s confusion in a time before the rigid bonds of gender identification finally started to yield (somewhat). In the background, the myths of the Hindu gods play out as a kind of chorus, as the humanized deities love and struggle and desire even as the narrator acts out his own confused journey. It’s interesting that he finds the underground world of gay culture nearly as confusing, rigid and arcane as the straight world. Upon telling friends about his relationship with “She,” they promptly recoil. This prompts a realization: “It occurred to him that the gays and the straights had more in common than he had considered before,” Shraya writes. “Just like the straights, the gays were intent on preserving and presenting a uniform, singular version of themselves; in this case, their gayness.” Sure, it’s a messy, experimental work, but props to Shraya for putting himself out there in such a daring way and speaking truth to power to readers all along the sexual spectrum.
An experimental multimedia hymn about delving into one’s self, seeking love without labels.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-55152-560-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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
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
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