Very much an insider’s story: a fictionalized rehash of Gotham gossip that most New Yorkers have tired of—and few...
A Borscht Belt version of The Bonfire of the Vanities, in which Roiphe (Married, 2002, etc.) follows the travails of a New York mayor whose city is coming apart at the seams.
Nobody expected much of Mel Rosenberg. They never expected him to become the mayor of New York in the first place, and after he pulls off the election, they don’t really know what he’s planning to do. Mel concentrates at first on the city’s schools, but the shadow of terrorism is soon cast when a string of inexplicable deaths take place. Mel’s daughter Ina, a biologist at the Department of Health, discovers that the deaths are the result of pizza that’s been laced with large quantities of psychotropic drugs (of the sort typically given to lunatics at outpatient clinics). The poison is later traced to Starbucks, and it soon becomes clear that a well-coordinated effort is at play. The mayor enlists the aid of Detective Loew, a cop descended from the legendary Rabbi Loew of Prague, to find out who’s responsible. But, New York being New York, there’s no way the investigation can proceed without political distractions. The Reverend Benjy Crick, a Harlem demagogue, spreads rumors that a (nonexistent) vaccine is being hoarded by Jews and administered in the basements of synagogues. And the mayor’s close friend (and Parking Commissioner) Neil Maguire is soon embroiled in a scandal regarding embezzled funds. (Maguire also has an insane son named Kevin who receives psychotropic drugs as an outpatient.) And there are smaller crises, as well, involving Mel’s social-climbing son Jacob (who wants to get his kids into a tony private school) and Ina (whose Russian brother-in-law Leonid turns out to have some shady connections). New York is ungovernable at the best of times—but now it looks as if it’ll become uninhabitable as well. Can Mel save the city?
Very much an insider’s story: a fictionalized rehash of Gotham gossip that most New Yorkers have tired of—and few out-of-towners will get.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-4945-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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