In this debut novel, Ben Travis, a lowly state senator in Texas, has stumbled into the job of governor.
Travis’ predecessor died in a crash, and the line of succession wobbled down to him. But as ill-equipped as he is to take charge of the Lone Star State, the ardent conservative isn't at all shy about leading the fight for secession after discovering a dirty federal secret. A rancher whose luck at business rescued him from abject failure, Travis is a handler's nightmare but the common man's dream come true. He says what's on his mind, even when there's nothing there, doesn't mind offending the easily offended and thinks nothing of dropping in on power-mad liberal President Michael Leary unannounced. This after stumbling—and slipping and sliding—on a federal pipeline illicitly running beneath a state highway. Armed with an obscure state's rights agreement with Texas signed by President Lincoln, Travis rallies secessionists in the face of the disorganized, golf-distracted president's dirty tricks. The action culminates with federal troops on the Oklahoma-Texas border and Travis counting on a pilot named McKill to fly him past fighter planes to the White House. The supporting cast includes Damon Cole, a conservative black politics professor with thousand-dollar shoes and two-cent nerves; Adam Wexler, a computer geek who specializes in stealing historical documents; Walt Thompson, a hugely popular right-wing radio host; and Travis' daughter Paige, a leftist justice department worker whose fling with Wexler complicates matters a bit. In bringing a humane point of view to the pitched election-year conflict between liberals and conservatives, this novel couldn't be timelier. As a bonus, Smiley smoothly mixes in bits of history about Texas politics and culture. A freewheeling political satire that does for politics what Texan Dan Jenkins' antic fictions did for golf and football. Smiley's first novel disproves the notion that conservatives can't be really funny.
Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00119-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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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