The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett

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. In an assured, warm, and graceful style, a moving novel that touches on the healing powers of chance sanctuaries of love and fancy in the acrid realities of living.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. Like Rose years before, her daughter considers the benefits of not knowing ``what was going on''.as the recent visitor-small, sad Tom Clinton-drives off, and Cecilia knows that Rose, who left before he came, will never return. The last narrator is teenaged Cecilia, struggling to find her elusive mother within the competent Rose, who's moved into her own house away from husband and daughter. The next narrative belongs to Son, a huge man originally from Tennessee-like Rose, gone forever from home-who recounts the last moments of his fiancÇe's life long ago (Sister Evangeline absolves him of responsibility) and who loves Rose. But in the home, once a grand hotel, Rose keeps her baby, Cecilia marries ``Son,'' the handyman (``God was right after all.I was supposed to live a small life with a man I didn't love'') and becomes the cook after briefly assisting that terrible cook, sage/seeress, and font of love, Sister Evangeline. Elizabeth's home for unwed mothers, where she plans to have the baby Tom will never know about, and to give it clean away. From San Diego, then, Rose drives-``nothing behind me and nothing ahead of me''-all the way to Kentucky and St.

``Maybe I was born to lie,'' thinks Rose, who, after a three- year marriage to nice Tom Clinton, realizes that she's misread the sign from God pointing to the wedding: she married a man she didn't love. Within the security of everydayness, minds and hearts take grievous risks. Patchett's first novel, set in rural Kentucky in a castle-like home for unwed mothers-where a good woman finds she cannot lie her way beyond love-has a quiet summer-morning sensibility that reminds one of the early work of Anne Tyler.

The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett