An engaging romp that fuses love, art, and seedy, midcentury New York.
A struggling freelance artist in 1957 forms an unlikely relationship with a New York mobster in this quirky throwback to the ’50s crime novel.
Silva (The Patsey, 2012) begins his narrative with a bang—quite literally. Frank Caprizzi, former “Boss of the New York Underworld,” is shot (but not killed) in the lobby of the residential Royal Crest Hotel. After this grabber of an opening, readers meet protagonist Joe Marlin, a West Coast expatriate who has moved to New York City with his girlfriend, Gilda; he wants to establish himself as a career cartoonist, and she seeks to make her mark as an actress. They live in a $30-a-week Upper West Side hotel apartment, not far from where Caprizzi was shot. But Joe, a decent guy, soon finds himself pulled into a world of violence due to Gilda’s liaison with mob-connected producer Tony Richman. Gilda met Tony in postwar Germany, and now she hopes that he’ll be her ticket to stage and screen. What follows is betrayal, a few murders, and prolonged pub crawls that are almost Joe’s undoing. Ironically, Joe’s possible salvation arrives when he meets the recovering mobster Caprizzi, who loves the crime comics of the late 1940s and early ’50s. Silva apparently created Joe by drawing on aspects of his own biography: both were students at the LA–based Chouinard Art Institute, worked in Disney Studios’ animation department, and decided to try their luck as cartoonists in the Big Apple. The author draws upon this resume to deliver realistic descriptions of the mechanical details of Joe’s work, his weekly slogs trying to sell his cartoons, and his attempts at networking with other artists. With the eye of an artist and the heart of a romantic, Silva also takes readers on a nostalgic tour of 1957 New York, including visits to the jazz haunts and private artist parties of Greenwich Village in its heyday. Although the prose is neither elegant nor lyrical, it remains serviceable and adequately showcases the author’s bent for the dramatic. Joe’s alcoholic binges do become tiresome, but the book maintains a relatively quick pace, employing short chapters to propel the action forward.
An engaging romp that fuses love, art, and seedy, midcentury New York.Pub Date: June 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61009-165-7
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Dark Oak Mysteries
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2016
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
APPRECIATIONS
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