In a Parisian cafÇ, an American surgeon recognizes the man who killed his father 30 years earlier and attacks him in a burst of uncontrollable passion—plunging himself into a conspiracy to bring the West once again under the wing of the Third Reich. Though his father's killer gets away, Dr. Paul Osborn soon tracks him down and identifies him as Albert Merriman, a career criminal supposedly dead since 1967. Paul plans to eliminate Merriman after forcing him to tell why he killed George Osborn. But a violent twist leaves him with nothing but another name: Erwin Scholl, who hired Merriman to kill four men including Osborn Sr. Enter the American bulldog Det. William McVey, who's helping Interpol investigate the baffling decapitation of seven victims who show evidence of being kept in a cryogenic freezer, and who's naturally interested in the American surgeon who was spotted in London just a few blocks from the latest murder. As Paul holes up with his well-connected new lover, Vera Monneray, and McVey tries to figure out why anybody would want to cool a corpse down near absolute zero, Swiss stroke victim Elton Lybarger heads back home with his New Mexico physical therapist Joanna Marsh- -who has no idea of the key roles Lybarger and his assistant Pascal Von Holden will play in a plot whose like you haven't seen since The Boys from Brazil. The Hitler-lives climax is tired, shrill, and overextended. Up until that last hundred pages, though, first-novelist Folsom keeps his complex plot spinning with tremendous brio and momentum. Anybody with the remotest taste for international intrigue will be hooked from page one. (Film rights to MGM; Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection)
Pub Date: April 6, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-28829-2
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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