Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. 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. Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest ( Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State. The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel. 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. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. 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. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. 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. 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. Unlike Norton’s first novel, focus is on the plot as the site of intrigue, but affinity with the characters is the cost.Ī page-turner well suited for readers seeking a light domestic thriller.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. At times, the characters seem to almost be running to keep up with the plot twists, which leaves little time for full development or more than surface-level insight into their motivations. Irish television personality Norton ( Holding, 2017, etc.) has crafted what turns out to be an ominous mystery for his second novel as two stories about motherhood unfurl simultaneously. In the present moment, Elizabeth’s life also becomes uncertain as she discovers Zach is lying about visiting his father and keeping secrets of his own. These sections become increasingly tense as Patricia visits his home and glimpses the sadness and dysfunction that grip him and his mother. Interspersed with the chapters about Elizabeth’s questions, other chapters flash back to detail Patricia’s initial correspondence and later relationship with Edward. To complicate matters, her mother’s lawyer informs Elizabeth that she has inherited a second property, her father’s house, which prompts a new round of investigation. Nearly all grown children realize this truth at some point, and yet it hits Elizabeth at an especially timely moment, as she’s a single mother to her son, Zach, who is nearing adulthood, and she faces a life just as alone as she perceived her mother's to be. She discovers a box of letters from Edward Foley, the father she never met and whom she was told had died when she was an infant, and realizes she has little idea who Patricia was outside her role as a mother. University professor Elizabeth Keane flies to Ireland to clean out her mother Patricia’s house in Buncarragh and ready it for sale. A daughter discovers layers of secrets surrounding her parentage when she returns to Ireland to settle her mother’s estate.
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