Sturm und Drang in a debut novel about a military hero’s identity crisis. Despite eight generations of warrior forebearers, Captain Sandy Caine keeps asking himself this central question: Was I meant to be a soldier? His doubt stems mostly from the mystery surrounding the demise of his father. Lieutenant Alex Caine died a coward in Viet Nam, Sandy has always been led to believe. But is it true? His grandfather, the revered Four Star General John Pershing Caine, has never left much room for doubt, and yet doubts persist, nagging at Sandy like a shirked responsibility. Then, while on duty in Somalia, in the aftermath of a firefight, he has a fateful encounter. Actually, two. As a result of the first—with a sergeant who served alongside his father—he receives a tantalizing revisionist report. Lieutenant Caine was steadfast and true, the sergeant maintains, but then is killed before he can say much more. The second encounter is with beautiful, imperturbable Abigail Mancini, a reporter for the Washington Chronicle, indefatigable in pursuit of a story. Until, that is, the advent of Sandy, who stops her presses and activates a trade-off of ambition for love. And since she’s a skilled investigative journalist, who better than Abby to help dig the dirt off long-buried secrets—especially since there has indeed been a cover-up, an astounding one, reaching into the loftiest corridors of power. With Abby at his side, plus several swashbuckling members of his Special Forces team, Sandy goes after the bad guys. Bullets mash, knives slash, blood gushes, and at the end triumphant Sandy, buoyed by self knowledge, has restored the family reputation, raising Caines to their accustomed place of honor. Decorated soldier, memorist, respected critic, Hackworth (Hazardous Duty, 1996, etc.) in his first fling at fiction gets some of it right. But 512 pages is too much military sprawl.
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-49164-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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