A deliciously inventive and historically astute political drama.
A historical novel dramatizes volatile disputes within the Kennedy administration over the Vietnam War.
In 1963, Vietnam is a political tinderbox for President John F. Kennedy. On the one hand, he wants to limit the number of American troops there, but on the other hand, a robust U.S. military presence is necessary to defeat a triumvirate of enemies: Chinese Communists, the Viet Cong, and the belligerent North Vietnamese. In addition, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, a Roman Catholic, insists on persecuting the Buddhist majority, who protest with increasing boldness. Nevertheless, the chief difficulty Kennedy seems to face in Vietnam arises from internecine conflicts within his own administration. A cabal of U.S. government groups, led by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and the CIA, works against Kennedy’s wishes in order to depose and potentially assassinate Diem. It’s into these tumultuous circumstances that U.S. Marine Maj. Steven Hebert is sent to Saigon, officially to function as the head of the embassy’s security and unofficially to keep tabs on Kennedy’s enemies in South Vietnam. Hebert encounters a relentless effort to remove Diem for nefarious reasons—Air Force Lt. Lucien Conein, a CIA operative, directs that mission partly to ensure the reinvigoration of the opium trade through French Corsican connections. Meanwhile, Thomas Warren, an FBI agent and a victim of an American program to experiment with LSD as an instrument of mind control, investigates Kennedy’s extramarital affairs. This first installment in Kesterson’s (The President’s Gold, 2013, etc.) Pawns series is astonishingly well-researched, the result of that rigor a vivid depiction of historical facts skillfully delivered within a fictional framework. The author is especially adept at explaining the fault lines within a frighteningly fractured presidential administration. Kesterson’s writing is clear and lively and more realistic than literary, which suits the subject matter. But the inner machinations of the American government were baroquely complex and ever shifting, and while the author does an admirable job imposing explanatory order on that chaos, those complications can become onerous to process. It would have been helpful to excise one of the numerous subplots. The one following the FBI’s surveillance of a potential presidential mistress didn’t require as much attention as it received.
A deliciously inventive and historically astute political drama.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9984707-2-6
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Amber Publishers Company
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2018
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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