Not the first novel to find humor in loss but an admirable addition to that venerable category.
A professor struggles with grief after his mother dies in front of him.
In this debut novel, Luther van der Loon is the very definition of an eccentric. He’s a failed harpsichord virtuoso–turned–Renaissance music professor in his 40s who, save for a single year abroad, has lived quite happily under the watchful eye of his mother, the two caring for each other. When she chokes to death on a bit of wonton takeout from the Seven Happiness Chinese restaurant, his world is suddenly thrown into upheaval. Not only has the cord finally, irrevocably been cut, but his own inability to save her with the Heimlich maneuver haunts him. His girlfriend of 15 years, Cecilia, seems well positioned as a therapist and thanatologist to aid him. But he treats the lessons about the stages of grief she has impressed upon him as trite, grappling with his loss under her watchful assessment. Suffering from insomnia and barely able to eat for fear of choking, Luther hides his anxiety in fits of musical intellectualism on hertz and ratios while looking for someone to blame as he pursues hollow monetary damages from Seven Happiness, a move he hides from Cecilia. LaHines’ tale paints a robust picture of a suffering neurotic stuck in his sorrow, her protagonist recalling a Laurence Sterne character. Luther lives in a world defined narrowly by his musical hobby horses. He is far from charming, at times approaching pathetic, but his character is so fully rendered in his overly verbose narration and melancholy that he becomes impossible to dismiss. And while the story takes turns that range from the very dark to Old World melodramatic, there is a great deal of humor present. Some of this comes from simple wordplay: a therapist named Dr. Fein, a medication called “Soliloquil,” and Luther’s academic papers “Pre-Mensural Notation.” Other moments, like his shocking confrontation with an ill-advised one-night stand caught eating the frozen remnants of the murderous soup, bring lots of laughs—and, most importantly, not at the expense of the stricken oddball.
Not the first novel to find humor in loss but an admirable addition to that venerable category.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-949180-91-6
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Adelaide Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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