Alvarez’s generosity of vision compensates for the not-altogether-convincing central conceit of her sixth novel.
Keep the faith: That simple message inspires a novelist when she and her husband are taken hostage.
Depression has been dogging 50-year-old Alma Huebner for some time, though it has not affected her rock-solid marriage to Richard, an environmental-aid executive. Her work has been the casualty. She’s lost interest in the characters of the sequel to her Latino family saga, which sounds a bit like Alvarez’s own How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1992), just as Alma’s backstory of leaving the Dominican Republic for the U.S. when she was ten echoes that of the author. As an alternative to the sequel, Alma is feeling her way into the psyches of two people on a real-life historical mission: Francisco Balmis, who undertook a court-sanctioned smallpox expedition from Spain to the New World in 1803, and Isabel, head of an orphanage supplying 22 children as carriers of the vaccine. Alvarez alternates between Isabel’s first-person account of the mission and Alma’s life in Vermont, disrupted when Richard leaves for the Dominican Republic to set up a “green center” in the mountains. All this makes for a quiet first half; the action explodes at the midpoint. In Vermont, Alma defends cancer-stricken neighbor Helen from her crazy son and daughter-in-law, self-styled “ethical terrorists.” In the DR, Richard is taken hostage by gun-toting local kids who are convinced that the AIDS clinic attached to his center will spread the disease. (Irrationality thrives in both the First and Third Worlds.) When the Balmis expedition gets off to a shaky start in Puerto Rico, Isabel becomes the heart and soul of the team, smoothing ruffled feathers and protecting her boys—though her mother-hen clucking is overdone. Alma flies down to the DR and, using the courageous Isabel as her “moral compass,” has herself taken hostage too. Both the modern and historical ventures end tragically.
Alvarez’s generosity of vision compensates for the not-altogether-convincing central conceit of her sixth novel.Pub Date: April 7, 2006
ISBN: 1-56512-510-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
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Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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