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. Overall, a slick, pleasant, promising, but rather shallow performance.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. What's lacking is substance: Hardy's characters don't know much, don't learn much, and their adventures are ordinary. And his structure-two troubled young people, a bequest, a quest, and the arrival in a famous place, is classically perfect. Hardy uses a lot of techniques: alternating points of view, for instance, including chapters from the dead Grant. He's a dreamy, likable fellow who makes good sense in an offbeat, slightly schizophrenic way, offering such aphorisms as ``A dream thwarted stays a dream.'' Finally, Nate and Sarah come to the realization that their father and Grant were doing their best to take care of them all along, albeit in a loony, ineffectual way. The two drive west in search of their father, eventually finding him in Yellowstone National Park, where he works at a concession and waxes eloquent about geysers. They cannot grieve over his passing, but it turns out that he has left them both a sizable fortune they also learn that Grant has been in continual contact with their father, Raymond. Grant had been left to raise them, and both disliked his arbitrary methods. Along the way, their talk reveals much about their past: the freak accident that led to their mother's death, for example, and to their father's emotional collapse and flight. Nate and Sarah don't get along, but when word comes that their older brother, Grant, has died, they drive to upstate New York for the funeral. His sister, Sarah, meanwhile, is almost pathologically disorganized: She can't get going on a career, can't stay with one boyfriend. He's both a perfectionist and indecisive, and not good at his work. Nate Scales is a struggling journalist on a struggling Boston paper, always handed such undesirable assignments as the police beat. From storywriter Hardy, a first novel about two brothers, their sister, and their father, each estranged from the others.
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