Corsaro’s karma? Still in question.
First novel—and a horror novel at that—by veteran opera director Corsaro.
Eight years ago, David Sussman went to India to sit at the feet of Rajneesh, and when he returned to Manhattan’s Psychiatric Institute he tried to get the Institute to bring Buddhist ideas to bear on the its method of analysis. For that, he was tossed out. Although he has some Buddhist trimmings in his office and technique, Dr. Sussman will strike few as a therapist of great resources when he reduces analysis to “games people play”—but we know he’ll pay for his simple-mindedness. Beautiful millionairess Laurel Hunt approaches him to look into the case of her prominent art dealer husband, who has been invaded, she says, by an evil entity or malevolent force that David comes to know as “Kunma.” His wife ties Hugh Caswell Hunt’s breakdown to the murder of Charles Kirkwood Palfrey, acting head of the Hunt Galleries in London, whose tongue was ripped out. When David interviews Hugh and reads up on him, he decides to transfer Laurel to bubbling occultist Dr. Ara Havakian, who warns David about Kunma but then has his own tongue ripped out and his brain chewed by canine-like incisors. Can it be the work of Tibet’s brain-eating Tolos monster? A tape Ara made of Laurel reveals that her husband is bisexual and that she’d had an affair with the late Charles Palfrey. David beds her, too, and she tells him that now he’ll also be on Kunma’s list. Then the drooling mouth and teeth of dead Palfrey savagely attack Laurel’s genitals. When David at last faces tongueless Kunma, a soul trapped in hell, he finds the thing seeking him as a teacher. Can David’s answers lie in the Tibetan Book of the Dead when he finds himself part of Kunma’s karmic destiny?
Corsaro’s karma? Still in question.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30472-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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