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. Giffin’s next had better be Something New.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. Reads, overall, like a rehash-however amusing-of Borrowed.
Unfortunately, Darcy doesn’t succeed either in shedding her stereotype as shopaholic sybarite or in sustaining a novel of her own. Ethan warms to her when she reveals she’s carrying twins, and the two rapidly-too rapidly-learn the real meaning of love and friendship. Almost immediately upon arrival in London, she meets all new girlfriends and attracts a caring, rich and handsome doctor. But things still come too easily to her, and consequently she experiences little meaningful struggle or other interesting conflict. Ethan, impatient with Darcy’s vanity and indifference to prenatal care, scolds her, whereupon she sets out to reform her shallow goals.
Rachel’s previous visit with Ethan is grist for more Borrowed backstory: Ethan confesses to Darcy that Rachel and Dex were an item long before the closet confrontation. colleague Claire deserts her as glitz-spoiling single motherhood looms, and Darcy ends up in London, bunking with another grade-school chum, Ethan, now a novelist and architectural writer. Darcy and Marcus attempt a relationship-with disastrous results. (Rachel even turned 30 first.) Darcy had strayed from her own engagement, going off with Dex’s groomsman Marcus, by whom, she learns, she’s pregnant. In the gal-pals’ lifelong competition, Darcy, the prettier and less ethical, has always trounced the allegedly smarter Rachel. Darcy and Rachel have been symbiotic friends since grade school, even moving together from Indiana to New York, Rachel to attend NYU Law and then work for a blue chip firm, Darcy to work in P.R. Dex has just dumped Darcy mere days before their wedding, and Darcy expected sympathy, not betrayal, from maid-of-honor Rachel (see Carrington, above).
Previously, Rachel took center stage, but the point of view shifts here to Darcy, who catches her fiancé, Dexter, hiding in the closet of Rachel’s Manhattan studio. Airhead antagonist gets her own novel in Giffin’s follow-up to Something Borrowed (2004).
0 kommentar(er)
