A too-brief page-turner featuring appealing characters.
This prequel to Lonely Deceptions (2011) follows the Davis brothers after World War II, and their dealings with a nefarious information broker.
In the winter of 1946, war veteran Nelson Davis, of Rosewood, New Jersey, has just laid his parents to rest. He’s now committed to caring for his older brother, Christopher, and hopes that they might go into business together. Christopher, however, has returned from the war with sensitive information—a secret list of names that he hopes to expose without endangering his last living relative. To that end, he travels to Georgia and attempts to contact The Savannah Times. Four months later, in a tavern, Nelson finally finds Christopher, who seems paranoid and roughed-up. The bartender tries to oust them, and after Christopher pummels the man, a car chase ensues, during which Christopher is gravely injured. Before dying, he hands Nelson the key to a train station locker, embroiling him in the intrigue surrounding the list. Meanwhile, Savannah Times reporter Rose Blake also searches for Christopher. When she finds Nelson instead, the two explore the list’s importance; central to the mystery is the ruthless, enigmatic Roth Braun, a man with ties to Hitler who seeks to profit from a secret cabal of American politicians. Willis (Cascading Lies, 2015) expands his story of the Davis family that he began in Lonely Deceptions; in that installment, Nelson is elderly and his adult children, Nick and Amy, must contend with an international syndicate. Once again, pulp fiction riffs prove to be Willis’ narrative specialty: “it’s not the liquor that stinks to high heaven in this bar,” Christopher says at one point. A subplot in which a woman hires a private eye to track her wayward fiance further embellishes the noir trappings. The plans of the senators, though, who say that “our political system has become ill,” remain underdeveloped. The most entertaining element of this tale is the chemistry between Nelson and Rose.
A too-brief page-turner featuring appealing characters.Pub Date: April 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4917-3116-1
Page Count: 138
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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