A humorous and compelling domestic tale about a man pushed to the edge.
A disgraced insurance salesman becomes the neighborhood spy in this comic novel.
When his 10-year-old nephew, Benny, is struck by a hit-and-run driver, Charlie Doyle immediately jumps into action. Unfortunately, Charlie is drunk and isn’t making the best decisions. When he gets Benny to the hospital, the boy has suffered substantial brain damage. Why didn’t Charlie just call an ambulance and let the professionals handle it? That’s what his neighbors begin to whisper about—and whether it was drunk Charlie who hit Benny in the first place. Following the accident, Charlie’s life begins to spiral out of control. He quits his job at an insurance agency, suspects that his wife may be cheating on him with his brother-in-law, and learns that his 18-year-old daughter, Velijah, was recently arrested for stealing booze from a liquor store. Then a sinkhole opens up and ruins Thanksgiving dinner. Charlie gets a job with a different insurance company—a lot of other sinkholes have opened up in the neighborhood—but his mission is actually to prevent people from collecting on their policies. When Charlie embarks on this unethical scheme with his new neighbor, blackmailer Effie Malfeezian, he also hopes to discover who exactly hit Benny. If he can figure out who did it, he may be able to clear his name and fix his family—and maybe even forgive himself. Smith’s (Scabland, 2017) prose walks the fine line between realism and slight absurdity, fashioning intriguingly odd scenarios. “What I’d like you to do, as a Secret Insurance Agent, is watch people,” explains Tammy Williams, Charlie’s handler. “Gather information. Even on people we’ve already paid out claims to on other matters. I want to know where our money is going. And where it’s not going.” The novel ends up in some unexpected (and slightly unbelievable) places, but the author constructs his world with enough logic and detail that readers will be happy to accompany him into the extraordinary. The result is a dark satire of suburban life reminiscent at times of Tom Perrota and A.M. Holmes.
A humorous and compelling domestic tale about a man pushed to the edge.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-08-659635-9
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Out Reach Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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