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EXECUTIVE JUNGLE

Levy’s fifth (Potomac Jungle, not reviewed) takes on Madison Avenue and the advertising game much as its template—Frederick Wakeman’s The Hucksters—did 50 years ago. In this thoroughly detailed business novel (much stronger than Wakeman’s light but sparky effort), with its old-timey pace, nobody worries about integrity—all are too busy keeping their heads out of the shark’s mouth—or the lion’s maw. The ten segments here are linked by the career of bright and aggressive Steve Lane, who moves from a Philadelphia ad agency to Madison Avenue’s Otis & Meade at nearly twice his former pay. O&M, it turns out, is in the throes of a top-level turnover: Meade’s no longer there, and Otis is 64, apparently ready to retire, dump his wife, and go off with his 40-year-old secretary to a peaceful old age. Under Otis are the company’s three top managers, one of whom must be his replacement. These three have formed a cabal to oust Otis through a stockholders’ vote and take over the company themselves, but Otis beats them to the punch, appointing one of the trio’s younger execs to his presidency while he becomes chairman. The second of the three’something of a hothead—then quits, and Otis has the president-to-be fire the third, after which he cans the new president (albeit with a velvet glove). At the other end of the frame, over 15 years later in “Five O’Clock Deadline,” Steve Lane (now top exec) is fighting for his life against a takeover by television personality Curly Ames, whom Steve himself brought into the fold from an Atlanta radio station and whose unpredictable personality has baited him to the number one ratings slot—and turned him into a rapacious shark. Levy, a vastly accomplished entertainment executive who started with the Young & Rubicam ad agency in 1938 and also wrote many famous radio shows, knows whereof he writes and how some stabs can never be stanched. Bloody well done.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998

ISBN: 1-57392-245-5

Page Count: 300

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998

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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 CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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