A labyrinth of stories made coherent with astute writing and a capable, authentic lead.
In Taylor’s (The Antelope Play, 2013, etc.) third legal thriller featuring Donnie Ray Cuinn, the Texas lawyer’s mother and adoptive father may have been schemed out of money by an old friend.
Don hasn’t been pals with Wesley Bird since the former all-American football player betrayed Don for his own political gain. But Wesley’s latest venture may be even worse: he’s convinced Don’s parents, professor Ralph Rothschild and Dorrie Louise, to invest in a (most likely) fraudulent land development deal. Unfortunately, Ralph has persuaded others at the Cartwright House, a retirement home where he’s staying, to invest as well. Don works to get everyone’s money returned, while also helping ensure that the H.H. Company doesn’t sell a tract of land—the Hieronymus Parcel, which neighbors the Cartwright House—for commercial development. The novel has an unusual structure: the novel treats all subplots equally. Don’s parents are initially the focus: the story opens with the Ralph-chaired group Save The Chimps trying to shut down the Primate Preserve on the Hieronymus Parcel. But Don can’t devote himself entirely to Ralph and Dorrie Louise; his office, which is barely making ends meet, is also handling difficult discrimination cases, and he just reignited a relationship with attorney Anna Kaye Nordstrom. Taylor’s approach works, however, by fueling the story with a fast pace and an obstacle-laden protagonist. The legal details ring true: Don is relegated to watching as the DA goes after Wesley for securities fraud and must hand off one of his cases to associate Wiley Franklin. His flaws, too, make him all the more intriguing; his romance with Anna Kaye, for one, may be doomed from the start, as he’s still pining over his late wife. Subplots receive excessive attention, including the convoluted legal back story to Don’s “errand man” Bobby Bill, but Taylor has fun with the entangled plot threads, providing clever and often unexpected resolutions, especially regarding Wesley’s shady deal.
A labyrinth of stories made coherent with astute writing and a capable, authentic lead.Pub Date: June 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9894707-1-1
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Katherine Brown Pres
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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