A Kafkaesque study of an amoral weakling consumed by an unrestrained bureaucracy.
Debut novelist Hughes imagines the circumstances leading up to the Victorian-era real-life hanging of John Delahunt, a convicted Irish child-murderer.
Trinity College education near complete, Delahunt anticipated launching himself into 1840s Dublin society as a gentleman. Then his father died. Delahunt soon learned the estate was mortgaged to pay for his father’s care. That was an inopportune time to meet Thomas Sibthorpe, who works for the shadowy "Department" at the Castle, headquarters of Dublin’s police. Transpiring thereafter is an intense character study, one in which Delahunt’s life becomes Hobbesian—nasty, brutish, and short. He accepts money from Sibthorpe to give false testimony about a street fight in which a constable was injured. Delahunt sees an opportunity for more easy money, necessary because he’s wooing Helen, a young woman of substance. Delahunt approaches her father for permission to marry. It’s granted, then rescinded once the father discovers Delahunt’s proclivities. The couple elopes. Helen is rejected by her family. The pair lands in a decrepit apartment. Delahunt later witnesses an assault, but there’s more money in witnessing murder. Delahunt, psychopathic and greedy, kills the wounded man. His testimony leads to an innocent being hanged. Helen’s the more ambiguous character. Although ignorant of the murder, she acquiesced to perjury for money. Then she descends into laudanum addiction following a botched abortion, and the marriage collapses, as does Delahunt. There’s much that is cringe-inducing as these less-than-admirable characters skulk through the cold, rain-drenched streets of Victorian Dublin. "Lyster had begun to use my fork to clean the grime from beneath his fingernails," Delahunt notes when a Sibthorpe cohort visits his apartment, a fitting observation of character in this tragedy, which is morbid reading on every page.
A Kafkaesque study of an amoral weakling consumed by an unrestrained bureaucracy.Pub Date: June 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-794-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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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