A quirky heist tale with too much emphasis on the theft, leaving its more vibrant features behind.
A host of eccentric criminals and an intrepid investigator get lost in the management of the U.S. Postal Service in this novel.
In a promisingly outlandish beginning, Quinlan (Collected Plays of Francis Quinlin, 2016) introduces readers to a man named The Professor, the wild resident of an asylum who channels a modern god named enoon, “deity, third rank, journalist, Cosmic News Bureau, New England Department.” It is actually enoon who narrates the story of POF and POOF, words soon revealed to be competing acronyms for an experiment in new amenities at the Postal Service. Almost five years after the implementation of POOF, $17.5 million of foreign currency disappears from a post office, throwing the postmaster, the U.S. president, numerous reporters, a group of bizarre conspirators, and even a curious old landlady on a collision course with one another and the corrupt, tangled bureaucracy that made the crime possible. At the center of all of this mess is Postal Inspector Emmett Keene, a solid investigator running only a few steps behind the culprits but always a little too late to stop their next crime or keep the chaos from evolving into a potential money-laundering scandal for the government. This is mostly thanks to a small, secret society that is manipulating the press to keep Keene off the track, unwittingly giving one of its own the perfect opportunity for a double-cross. While early chapters feature a blend of inspired lunacy with political critique reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut or Tom Robbins, Quinlan’s novel buries its most charming features with a more conventional procedural. Too much time with the two-dimensional Keene and an overwhelming number of point-of-view characters produce this effect, but nonetheless there are bright, quirky moments that cannot help but grab the spotlight. An incredibly hot-tempered postal worker, villains who develop their own court system for making decisions, and a man with multiple personalities are just some of the inventive elements that should dominate this story but that unfortunately spend too much time in the shadows.
A quirky heist tale with too much emphasis on the theft, leaving its more vibrant features behind.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5301-5909-3
Page Count: 428
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 21, 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
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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