A novel with laudable ambitions that doesn’t generate enough real drama to galvanize its torpid narrative.
In Anselmi’s debut novel, a self-made man is accused of murdering his business partner and wife.
Guy Bennett, the son of Italian immigrants, is living the American dream. He oversees a real estate empire, has his own skyscraper in Manhattan, and his son, Albert, is a newly elected U.S. senator. But as he fights off a hostile takeover, he’s accused of killing his business partner, Vito Petrozzini, and his wife, Lena. As a result, his world comes crashing down around him. It turns out that he’s being prosecuted by Assistant District Attorney Thomas Straid, who’s out for revenge for losing his own senatorial bid. Guy’s younger son, Edward, defends him even though he despises Guy for refusing to acknowledge his pregnant Japanese lover, Nancy. Edward comes to believe that his father is being framed, and his search for the truth takes him into the past of his grandfather Dante Di Benedetto. In addition to being a murder mystery, courtroom drama and business thriller, this is also a story about the immigrant experience in America. In a lengthy flashback, readers follow Dante and his best friend, Adamo Petrozzini, father of Vito, as they make the journey from Italy to America and put down new roots in Jersey City, New Jersey. For his debut, Anselmi has written an ambitious and downright old-fashioned novel. Its narrative covers a lot of ground, from 1920 Italy to near-present-day New York City. However, there’s a stolid quality to the writing that may prevent some readers from fully engaging with the material. The characters lack the necessary shading to convince readers that they’re worthy of sympathy. Although this book’s depiction of immigrant life, big business and senatorial politics fuses together many different genres, it does so in a way that’s imitative, not immersive.
A novel with laudable ambitions that doesn’t generate enough real drama to galvanize its torpid narrative.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62901-120-2
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Inkwater Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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