Begins with promise, but characters are reduced to clichés by overly simplistic conflicts.
A federal antipoverty worker finds his job on the line with the arrival of a new boss.
Michael Napolitano works as at the Survival Center, a service agency that provides food and goods to local low-income families in rural Massachusetts. Despite earning wages so low that he jokingly refers to himself as a volunteer, Napolitano enjoys his job and finds the work rewarding. With the arrival of new executive director Mr. Prince, however, Napolitano soon discovers an ugly side of the nonprofit world. In addition to being completely ambivalent to the center’s philanthropic goals, Prince reeks of cheap cologne and eagerly throws around racial slurs. When Prince refuses to give bread to an elderly woman who arrives after the official closing time, the situation sparks a heated confrontation between Prince and Napolitano that ultimately leads to the director firing Napolitano. Shocked by his rapid dismissal, Napolitano struggles to maintain normalcy by starting a new job, discussing politics with his friends and pursuing an unlikely romance with a beautiful woman. Finally he seeks the advice of Sarah, the beloved former director at the center, and discovers a nefarious secret about Prince’s past. While the book accurately depicts the disparities that can arise between nonprofit workers and the bureaucrats financing them, it reduces these characters to two-dimensional caricatures. As a sarcastic Italian-American with a stutter and a soft spot for doughnuts, Napolitano makes for a likable hero, but his inability to communicate reasonably with bosses and board members he dislikes is unrealistic and would result in any employee being fired. Similarly, the book contains cartoonishly evil villains who seem bent on closing or relocating the center for no apparent reason. By the time Napolitano enlists the help of a cowboy from the West Coast to rough up the director and restore order to the center, readers will have already drifted from the increasingly ridiculous plot.
Begins with promise, but characters are reduced to clichés by overly simplistic conflicts.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-1452812427
Page Count: 162
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2011
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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