Wilson switches from horror (Nightworld, 1992) to medical suspense and strikes notes that harmonize Robin Cook's Coma with John Grisham's The Firm and The Pelican Brief. The evidence is that he's livelier at horror. As in Grisham's The Firm, Wilson posits a superrich fantasy establishment—The Ingraham College of Medicine—that offers state- of-the-art equipment and a vastly high-level education, all of it tuition-free!—if you can only fit the profile demanded by the faculty. Yes, any outfit this fantastic must have something wrong with it, even though it's funded by the Kleederman Foundation and based on the Kleederman billions from advanced drugs. For one thing, you aren't allowed to leave the campus and break the school's spell on you. It's young Quinn Clery, one of the very few young women admitted to first-year studies, who accidentally breaks through the veil hiding The Ingraham's activities from the outer world. There's absolutely no doubt that The Ingraham and the Kleederman Foundation do good work, save lives with new drugs, and focus much of their research on poor inner-city hospitals, where most graduates wind up. All very noble. But Quinn's boyfriend- -fellow student Tim Brown, a whiz with a photographic memory who induces her to take a short trip with him to Atlantic City, where he counts cards at blackjack and wins $2,000 in an hour—discovers the reason why Quinn seems never quite to fit in at the college: all students' beds are bugged with electronic devices for subliminally influencing them into becoming inner-city patriots of medicine, but Quinn's bug apparently doesn't work on her, and she forever brings up arguments against the school's do-gooder ethic. It turns out that The Ingraham is actually a warehouse for illegally testing advanced drugs on living patients, the same job practiced by the do-gooders in the inner-city hospitals.... Opens strongly but that feeble chase-ending defeats praise.
Pub Date: Feb. 18, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-04618-5
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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