There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. 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. The symmetries and compensations here are a bit too tidy, and though his final vignette leaves the reader astonished once again, the larger satisfactions of mature plot-making remain elusive for this powerful, promising writer.įour 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. The tightly wound Jonah improbably attempts to “rescue” the boy back into Troy’s custody, even as Troy continues to struggle with the new knowledge that he has a long-lost brother. Hiring on as a cook where his half-brother works, Jonah learns that Troy, recently arrested for marijuana possession, has lost custody of his son Loomis. When Jonah sets out to find the brother he’s heard his mother mention, Chaon’s taut mastery slackens. Each incident is expertly delineated as the narrative gathers momentum: Troy’s early experiences with soft drugs and girls, Jonah’s mauling by his grandfather’s Doberman, and their mother’s yearlong stay at a home for unwed mothers. Jonah lives with his mother, herself an orphan, her wifeless father, and a Doberman pinscher. While his legal parents shred apart the last tendrils of their marriage, Troy is taken into a young family’s circle. Nearly all the characters here are adopted, in one way or another, some more than once. Troy was adopted out, while Jonah was raised by his mother and grandfather. As these precisely dated chapters collect, the larger design of the whole emerges. The initial handful of chapters here, in fact, read like a fresh collection of stories, distinguished as usual by the shy, cutting honesty of Chaon’s prose. Meanwhile, I’m stuck still in close distance to all these places that will continue to remind me of our time together each and every time I accidentally run into them again.Acclaimed storywriter Chaon ( Among the Missing, 2001, etc.) affirms his matchless skill in crafting the small sketch, even as he struggles to conclude the weather-beaten plot of his first novel with large-scale grace. We never created any memories wherever you are at now. You don’t have to haphazardly end up at any of these places anymore that could possibly trigger a memory of me. Sometimes I envy you because you got to leave it all behind. It felt so weird being in the presence of these places and not being there because of you. That no matter how much time has passed, or how far away you are, or how much my life has changed since then, these places are still there and haven’t changed one bit. It all seemed like a big dream, like the memories were something my mind had made up. I drove past that stupid street that always reminds me of you, the place where we had our first fight, and finally the last place we saw each other.
I saw the place where we were first intimate and the other place we were at when I first realized you were something special to me. That one place we snuck into to have time alone together for the first time and the place where we had our first date. I drove past the place where we first met and the place where we shared our first kiss. I let go of that nagging voice inside my head telling me I shouldn’t do this and kept driving. I became curious because it had been so long since I had seen so many of those places that helped to create what we had. Until I realized that so many places in that city reminded me of you. I forgot about any destination that I needed to be at and decided to let my mind take control of the steering wheel, taking me to so many places that brought me back to so many amazing memories. I was stuck in a certain city, with just myself and my car, and began thinking about all the places that have made me feel the most alive in that particular city. Two things that can be very lethal when put together.
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