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BLOODLINES

Ducker’s sixth novel (And Lead Us Not into Penn Station, 1994, etc.) spins an intensely revealing fable out of today’s headlines in this story of a young American in pursuit of his family’s ties to Swiss bank accounts looted from Holocaust victims. Bereft of his jazz piano gig and his stateside girlfriend, Peter Steinmuller seizes on his name in a Zurich newspaper as the portal to an enchanted world. The Lîwenhoft Handelsbank is seeking depositors or their heirs to claim funds left with the bank during the dark hours of the war 50 years earlier. Once Peter’s filled out the stack of paperwork required to claim the money in his eponymous grandfather’s account, though, he’s amazed to find that the balance, after a series of payments authorized by the trustee, is only a few hundred dollars'less than he owes the lawyer who’s prepared his claim. Assistant bank manager Helene Durren can’t help him track down the trustee, she insists, though she does end up warming his bed. And the trustee, enigmatic business titan Frederic Von Egger, can’t help him either, except to the extent of offering him his friendship, the hospitality of his estate, and what amounts to the original balance in the account (something over $90,000) if only he’ll leave the country for good. Instead of accepting this apparently generous offer, Peter, in the tradition of every self-respecting fairy-tale hero with “no languages, no contacts, no training,” vows to ferret out every last secret of the account, even if it means digging up unsuspected family skeletons and linking his grandfather’s account to an awful lot of other missing money. Arranging to have every door open as if by magic at Peter’s touch, Ducker provides a rising spiral of thrills without the familiar trappings of melodrama in his best novel yet. (Film rights to Doorbell Productions)

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000

ISBN: 1-57962-060-4

Page Count: 264

Publisher: Permanent Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Life lessons.

Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.

Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.

Pub Date: July 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-345-46750-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004

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