An intriguing tale with a clever narrative twist that nearly compensates for its lack of dramatic excitement.
Lawton’s (Imagining Russia 2000, 2004) novel looks at the half-century journey of two best friends who moved from Italy to the United States in 1967.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Amy is in her 50s and living in New York City. She was born and raised around Turin, Italy, at the end of the 1940s, the wealthy daughter of an American, Larry, and an Italian, Anna. The fact that Amy had a foreign father caused local kids to shun her, but she did have one best friend—an Italian girl named Stella. Now, in 2001, she’s taken over Larry’s publishing house and is committed to finally publishing what she feels is the most important manuscript in her possession—Stella’s diaries, written between 1967 and 1985. Much of Stella’s memoir, which comprises Part 2 of this novel, is about her deep, complicated relationship with Jim Welsh, a film scholar and teacher in Venice, California. Jim is moody, Stella is restless, and after a few years, they separate. The first-person manuscript ends abruptly in 1985, and Part 3 of the narrative jumps to 2001 once again as Amy decides to turn Stella’s memoir into a novel. Savvy readers will suspect that something isn’t quite as it appears, as Italian author Lawton, in her first novel in English, effectively drops breadcrumbs along the way. Her prose is more expository than passionate in nature, and it includes numerous engaging discussions about the political, cultural, and social movements roiling America in different eras. However, these sometimes come at the expense of a fuller portrayal of Amy and Stella’s immigrant journey. Readers may wish that Lawton had provided more about how the women found their place and purpose in a new country in changing times.
An intriguing tale with a clever narrative twist that nearly compensates for its lack of dramatic excitement.Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9974962-1-5
Page Count: 248
Publisher: New Academia Publishing/ The Spring
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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