A notable debut that infuses an engrossing legal procedural with deep empathy.
A young attorney struggles to humanize the law—and himself—in this quietly absorbing legal tale.
Fired from his high-powered Boston law firm for an unseemly attack of conscience, 32-year-old Mark Langley has descended to the lowest rung of the lawyering trade as a legal services attorney doing eviction cases in his blue-collar hometown of Worcester, Mass. In the assembly-line proceedings of Housing Court, there’s little he can do for his impoverished clients—many of them tenants in the town’s bleak housing projects—except postpone the day they’ll be evicted. Then a case comes along with a mixture of technicalities and pathos that grabs his attention: a single mom faces eviction from public housing because her son was arrested on drug charges; a guilty verdict would cause her other son to lose his college scholarship. While he pursues a long-shot trial in the case, Mark also squares off against the haughty mandarins in his old firm to challenge the corrupt diversion of anti-poverty funds to a well-connected developer. In his first novel, Dinnocenzo, himself an attorney with legal-services experience, ventures into John Grisham territory—a callow, idealistic lawyer battles the establishment—but with less histrionics and more social insight. Poverty, chaos and infuriating regulations precipitate one crisis after another in the lives of his underclass strivers. The seemingly low-stakes Housing Court becomes an arena of tense legal strategizing and real drama, where verdicts destroy families. Writing in a limpid, nuanced prose, Dinnocenzo crafts sharp but subtle portraits of his characters and their agonizing dilemmas. Mark in particular is a flawed but appealing hero plagued by self-doubt and courtroom stage fright. He’s torn between glittering yuppie Boston and dilapidated Worcester as he obsessively sharpens his arguments in pursuit of justice for people who can’t afford it otherwise.
A notable debut that infuses an engrossing legal procedural with deep empathy.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462004775
Page Count: 264
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four 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.
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. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. 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. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. 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. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. 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.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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