A retired spook gets sucked back into the geopolitical slugfest in the last days of the Soviet Union, where the bad old Stalinists want to do a deal with the bad old Red Chinese to quash the threat of peace. Old cold warrior Hunt (Body Count, etc.) continues to chase the Ian Fleming food, wine, and spy-loving-women award. Quinn Chance, formerly of the CIA, has buried himself in rural Virginia—but his quality time ends when rogue KGB types decide he would be perfect to stick with the blame for a murder. His victim is to be the messenger from a peace-minded Politburo faction trying to get in touch with their oppos in Peking through the Chinese embassy in Washington. Chance is supposed to die in a fake shootout with the messenger—but his pocket calculator stops the bullet, and he takes it on the lam. Does his old employer, the CIA, help him out? It does not. For various reasons, the Agency would like to see Chance gone as dearly as the KGB would. He is saved from arrest by, of all people, the Chinese, who whisk him into hiding, provide him with the latest in plastic surgery, and hire him to sort things out for them. Sorting out takes him to Geneva, where he gambles and gambols in best Bondian fashion with his Chinese housemaid, with the gorgeous sister of an old CIA associate, and with the latest emissary of Soviet peace. There is a Hair-raising Chase on Swiss Roads in Expensive Cars. There are shootouts after expensive meals and in luxurious homes. There is stupendously satisfying, uncomplicated sex. When things don't turn out the way anyone planned, Chance is off to his ancestral village in Austria, then to a rendezvous with a Traitor From The Past in remotest Argentina. Period piece for the Cuban-cigar set.
Pub Date: Nov. 23, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-08157-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1992
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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