Kilroy deftly characterizes the absurdity of a land grab, though within a curiously limited range of characters.
The recent Irish property bubble fuels this story of an ill-fated developer and the mysterious, diabolical figure who supports him.
We meet Tristram St. Lawrence, the narrator of Kilroy’s fourth novel (Tenderwire, 2006), during a crash landing in his native Dublin, an experience that prompts him to think about drinking again and also reunites him with Hickey, a childhood friend. It’s 2006, and Hickey is doing well in the speculative business of residential and hotel developments; rezoning an industrial park for hotel rooms and condos is as easy as paying a “fee” to a minister, and desolate, abandoned farmland can be valuable if you can persuade the same minister to reroute a train line there. Hickey is the stereotypical muscle while Tristram is the brains, with the financial support of a Mr. Deauville (note the name), who is also Tristram’s AA sponsor, in contact solely by phone from an unlisted number. Kilroy means to humanize the absurdity of the global boom (and bust) without dwelling too much on its technicalities, which is to the book's credit; Tristram’s devilish supporter gives the story a touch of black humor and underscores the way small human foibles can result in multimillion-euro catastrophes. Even so, the book feels constrained, like a black-box play with just a handful of props, partly due to the story’s framing as Tristram’s court testimony 10 years after the fact. Moreover, Kilroy’s tight focus on Tristram, his alcoholism and his efforts to restrain Hickey’s greed (an addiction in its own right) make a potentially big story feel small, while some subplots are underdeveloped, particularly one in which Tristram pursues an affair.
Kilroy deftly characterizes the absurdity of a land grab, though within a curiously limited range of characters.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2237-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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 presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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