Second-novelist Rosenbaum (the Edgar-nominated Zaddik, 1993) returns with a tightly placed story of thieves, double-crosses, and the Russian mafia. Sasha is a likable con man who's left Mother Russia for New York City's the ÇmigrÇ community of Brighton Beach. His hustles include everything from babies for shady adoptions to phony Small Business Administration Loans. Then Boris, an old friend from Russia, arrives—and is promptly murdered, in front of Sasha. Sasha flees the scene, taking the antique box Boris was supposed to deliver to a third party. Thinking Boris's death is linked to the box, he hides it at the apartment of Maddy Malloy, a newspaper reporter working on the story of the murder. She knows that Sasha has stashed it in her closet, but she's fallen for him. The murder investigation ties Boris and Sasha to organized crime, plus Maddy realizes that almost everything Sasha has told her was untrue, and still she lies to the police and her editor about her relationship with him—and the location of the mystery box. Meantime, Sasha has fled to Russia to get away from whoever killed Boris. There, he discovers that the box contained Russian uranium, and that the buyer was the CIA (which is trying to keep former Soviet supplies away from bad-guy nations). Sasha returns to the US to recover the uranium, but by this time a whole lot of folks have the same idea: former KGB agents, the CIA, two sets of Russian Mafioso, and various freelance thugs. And most of them target Maddy, thanks to Sasha. Further complicating life is the search for a hidden cache of art, valuable in its own right as well as being a means to smuggle future shipments of uranium. Fast, intriguing, and often violent. Even when he's a jerk, you'll find yourself pulling for Sasha. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 5, 1995
ISBN: 0-89296-591-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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