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 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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