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. Introverted, clotted, short of narrative drive and, above all, unconvincing, this sensitive but obsessive family anatomization will test the patience of many readers.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. This complicated cast is matched by Selasi’s taste for fragmented, overloaded sentences: “That still farther, past ‘free,’ there lay ‘loved,’ in her laughter, lay ‘home’ in her touch, in the soft of her Afro?” More secrets, wounds and identity crises are rehashed in Africa, until the scattering of the ashes restores some unity. And anxious Sadie is bulimic and withdrawn. Artist Kehinde, hiding in Brooklyn, yearns shamefully for his sister.
Taiwo is still in therapy after her high-profile student affair with the dean of law. Olu, now half of a Boston-based “golden couple,” doesn’t believe in family. The remainder of the book follows the impact of the patriarch’s death on this group, which assembles for the funeral. One central event was the breakup of Kweku’s marriage to Fola and separation from his four children: Olu, twins Taiwo and Kehinde and youngest Sadie. The death of Kweku Sai, a noted surgeon, in the garden of his home in Accra, Ghana, on page one is followed by an impressionistic account of his life-glimpses of childhood and parenthood, moments of shame and bad decisions, regrets, ironies and final thoughts. The bonds of love, loss and misunderstanding connecting an African family are exhaustively dissected in a convoluted first novel.
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