An elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn’t seem more familiar with his characters or territory.
Manhattan in the late 1930s is the setting for this saga of a bright, attractive and ambitious young woman whose relationships with her insecure roommate and the privileged Adonis they meet in a jazz club are never the same after an auto accident.
Towles' buzzed-about first novel is an affectionate return to the post–Jazz Age years, and the literary style that grew out of it (though seasoned with expletives). Brooklyn girl Katey Kontent and her boardinghouse mate, Midwestern beauty Eve Ross, are expert flirts who become an instant, inseparable threesome with mysterious young banker Tinker Grey. With him, they hit all the hot nightspots and consume much alcohol. After a milk truck mauls his roadster with the women in it, permanently scarring Eve, the guilt-ridden Tinker devotes himself to her, though he and she both know he has stronger feelings for Katey. Strong-willed Katey works her way up the career ladder, from secretarial job on Wall Street to publisher’s assistant at Condé Nast, forging friendships with society types and not allowing social niceties to stand in her way. Eve and Tinker grow apart, and then Kate, belatedly seeing Tinker for what he is, sadly gives up on him. Named after George Washington's book of moral and social codes, this novel documents with breezy intelligence and impeccable reserve the machinations of wealth and power at an historical moment that in some ways seems not so different from the current one. Tinker, echoing Gatsby, is permanently adrift. The novel is a bit light on plot, relying perhaps too much on description. But the characters are beautifully drawn, the dialogue is sharp and Towles avoids the period nostalgia and sentimentality to which a lesser writer might succumb.
An elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn’t seem more familiar with his characters or territory.Pub Date: July 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02269-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
When you’re done binge-watching The Crown, pick up this multifaceted wartime thriller.
During German bombing raids on London during World War II, the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret are secreted away to Ireland for protection.
Clonmillis Hall has seen better days. A large estate in rural Ireland belonging to the Duke of Edenmore, Clonmillis, by virtue of Ireland’s neutrality in the war, feels a world away from the bombs raining down on England. But during a secret meeting in Dublin, arrangements are made: King George’s two young daughters need to be kept safe during the Blitz, and remote Ireland seems the perfect place. The result is a series of domestic and professional frictions of nationality, class, religion, and gender. There is Dick Lascelles, the louche, charismatic diplomat in charge of the arrangements. Detective Garda Strafford, whose Anglo-Irish background sets him somewhat apart from his countrymen, oversees the estate’s security. Special Agent Celia Nashe, posing as a governess, is caught between her professional duties and being a surrogate caretaker to the serious elder princess, code-named “Ellen,” and the fiery younger girl, “Mary.” There is the irascible Duke and his household staff, who have varying levels of knowledge of the plot, and then there are those outside the estate who would seek to undermine the safety of everyone on it. Black (the pen name of Booker Prize–winning novelist John Banville) continues his storied career in the same vein as his most recent novel, Wolf on a String (2017), a historical mystery set in Prague, though his return here to his native Ireland is a welcome one. As ever, Black’s gifts of rich description and deft characterization are on display, and if the first half of the novel is more leisurely than a typical political thriller, its second half positively gallops.
When you’re done binge-watching The Crown, pick up this multifaceted wartime thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-13301-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
A vivid setting and a devious, deadly plot, though the first is a bit overdone and the second contains a few...
In 1956, a pair of college roommates meets again in Tangier, with terrifying results.
“At first, I had told myself that Tangier wouldn’t be so terrible,” says Alice Shipley, a young wife dragged there by her unpleasant husband, John McAllister, who has married her for her money. He vanishes every day into the city, which he adores, while Alice is afraid to go out at all, having once gotten lost in the flea market. Then Lucy Mason, her one-time best friend and roommate at Bennington College, shows up unannounced on her doorstep. “I had never, not once in the many moments that had occurred between the Green Mountains of Vermont and the dusty alleyways of Morocco, expected to see her again.” Alice and Lucy did not part on good terms; there are repeated references to a horrible accident which will remain mysterious for some time. What is clear is that Lucy is romantically obsessed with Alice and that Alice is afraid of her. In chapters that alternate between the two women’s points of view, the past and the present unfold. The two young women bonded quickly at Bennington: though Alice is a wealthy, delicate Brit and Lucy a rough-edged local on scholarship, both are orphans. Or at least Lucy says she is—from the start, there are inconsistencies in her story that put Alice in doubt. And while Alice is so frightened of Tangier that she can’t leave the house, Lucy feels right at home: she finds the maze of souks electrifying, and she quickly learns to enjoy the local custom of drinking scalding hot mint tea in the heat. She makes a friend, a shady local named Joseph, and immediately begins lying to him, introducing herself as Alice Shipley. Something evil this way comes, for sure. Mangan’s debut pays homage to The Talented Mr. Ripley and to the work of Daphne du Maurier and Shirley Jackson.
A vivid setting and a devious, deadly plot, though the first is a bit overdone and the second contains a few head-scratchers, including the evil-lesbian trope. Film rights have already been sold; it will make a good movie.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-268666-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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