A potent, nearly perfect brew of politics, murder, mayhem, and mystery.
Stokes’ (How to Keep Calm and Carry On, 2014, etc.) crisp work of historical fiction animates the most sensational homicide trial in the criminal annals of Oklahoma.
It’s a familiar story. A middle-aged man falls in love with a much younger woman, and they carry on for years, until stronger passions, such as the desire for power and fame, conflict with what passes for love. It’s worth noting that the middle-aged man in this true story was “the Oil King of Oklahoma,” Jacob “Jake” Hamon, slated to be a member of President Warren Harding’s cabinet until his megalomania and other character failings derailed his ambitions and ended up costing him his life. Hamon was 37, and his paramour, Clara Smith, was just 17 when she came to his attention. Never mind that he was a prominent Republican and a married man with two children, Jake installs his mistress in a hotel suite in the Oklahoma town of Ardmore. Clara, for her part, is no wide-eyed ingénue , exploiting Hamon’s riches to pad her own purse. Eventually Jake’s megalomania kicks in, and he dumps Clara for political gain only to have her fatally shoot him. Stokes’ tightly paced narrative keeps humming even when it’s focused not just on the sensational crime, but all associated players as well. Especially impressive is the nuanced character development—there are no uniformly good or bad guys here; even Jake’s long-suffering wife exploits his death to raise her own social standing. Despite a lag in the action toward the end—when the story focuses on the aftermath of the shooting and Clara’s 15 minutes of fame—it’s a revealing exercise in the way public opinion can make or break one person’s fortunes. A relevant lesson in today’s hashtag-driven pop-culture world.
Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9969892-0-6
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Critical Mass Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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