An extravagantly far-fetched novel that ogles celebrity even as it professes artistic detachment.
A world-class photographer has close calls in Fidel’s Havana and Saddam’s Baghdad in the latest from novelist/critic Lentricchia (Crimes of Art and Terror, 2003, etc.).
Days before the 1962 Missile Crisis, while she was a college senior, Ruth Cohen went to Cuba and took seemingly artless photographs of ordinary Cubans that rocketed her to overnight fame, causing rumors to swirl that she had slept with both Fidel and JFK (not true, though Adlai did make a pass at her at Bobby and Ethel’s place). But something terrible happened in Havana. Ruth was the innocent dupe of two Cuban double agents working for Uncle Sam; the plot to kill Castro went awry, and a small girl died in agony before Ruth’s eyes. Ruth feels responsible for the girl’s death; she seeks anonymity and eventually gives up her career. In 1990, in Utica, N.Y., she meets Thomas Lucchesi, a dismally unsuccessful Italian-American experimental novelist; he’s 59, she’s 46. They marry the next year and retreat to the remote Adirondacks, to live on land given to Ruth by a Rockefeller. At this point, the author fastforwards to 2002, as the build-up to the war in Iraq begins. New Yorker magazine plucks Ruth from obscurity to photograph Saddam; Thomas accompanies her. The shoot is a great success, but then Thomas is grabbed by Saddam’s goons; it’s all a farcical misunderstanding, but he disappears for good. On the surface, this love story makes little sense: Why would Ruth be drawn to the wimpy, hypochondriac Thomas when she’s attracted to men of power (she enjoys Saddam, to her horror)? Buried beneath it, there’s a far more interesting story about an artist looking for redemption, though it’s mystifying that we learn nothing about Ruth’s background, but far too much about Thomas’s (and Lentricchia’s) Utica.
An extravagantly far-fetched novel that ogles celebrity even as it professes artistic detachment.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-9766593-5-2
Page Count: 195
Publisher: Ravenna Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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Thriller fans will find so much space devoted to Gia and Jake’s sexual acrobatics that little time is left for the plot to...
A small Tennessee mountain town is awash in sex and scandal in Belle’s first novel.
Gia Andrews, a disaster relief worker, is also a convicted murderer’s daughter. Her father, Ray, was convicted of killing his wife and Gia’s stepmother, Ella Mae, and sentenced to life in prison. But Ray is dying, and prison officials are releasing him on compassionate grounds; Gia’s uncle Cal, a prominent lawyer, has recruited her to return home from Kenya to care for her dad in his home in Rogersville. Despite the fact that she hasn’t seen her father since she left many years ago, she returns, believing her brother, Bo, and sister, Lexi, will help her, but she finds that neither wants anything to do with their father. Her nearest allies turn out to be the home-care worker Uncle Cal has hired, Fannie, and the new man she meets, a bar-and-grill owner named Jake. When Gia meets a law professor planning to write a book about wrongful convictions, he tells her he believes Ray didn’t kill Ella Mae and that Cal, who was Ray’s attorney, didn’t mount much of a defense. After looking into these allegations, Gia discovers her stepmother had an affair with another man and wonders whether her father could be innocent after all. While trying to unravel the mystery of who really killed Ella Mae, things heat up between Gia and Jake, and suddenly the mystery takes a whole new direction. Belle’s a smooth writer whose characters are vibrant and truly reflect the area where the novel is set, but the plot—while clever—takes a back seat to Gia’s and Ella Mae’s separate, but equally steamy, sexual exploits.
Thriller fans will find so much space devoted to Gia and Jake’s sexual acrobatics that little time is left for the plot to develop.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1722-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
The late (d. 1988), leathery, awesomely unstoppable (over 100 books still in print) L’Amour, still producing fluently from his grave (End of the Drive, 1997), offers one more gathering of unpublished tales, proving again that great writing laughs at death. Showing sheer contempt for slow openings, L’Amour’s seven newly discovered short stories offer some breath-catching first paragraphs echoing with the cold steel click of a Colt .45 hammer being cocked. The lead story, “The Man from Utah,” polishes L’Amour’s walnut prose to its glossiest grain. Bearing a fearsome reputation as a gunfighter, Marshall Utah Blaine arrives in Squaw Creek to investigate 14 recent murders (three were marshals) by a cunning bandit masquerading as an upright citizen. By a process of deduction, the shrewd Blaine narrows his suspects down until he has the killer. “Here Ends the Trail” opens with a High L’Amouresque Miltonic Inversion: “Cold was the night and bitter the wind and brutal the trail behind. Hunched in the saddle, I growled at the dark and peered through the blinding rain. The agony of my wound was a white-hot flame from the bullet of Korry Gleason.” This builds to an explosive climax that mixes vengeance with great-heartedness. “Battle at Burnt Camp,” “Ironwood Station” and “The Man from the Dead Hills” all live up to the melodrama of their blue-steel titles. “Strawhouse Trail” opens memorably with the line: “He looked through his field glasses into the eyes of a dying man.” And never lets up. The title novella tells of Lona Markham’s unwilling engagement to six-foot-five, 250-pound, harsh-lipped Frank Mailer, who has “blue, slightly glassy eyes.” Will Lance Kilkenny, the mysterious Black Rider, save her from indestructible Mailer? Stinging stories of powerful men against landscapes you can strike a match on.
Pub Date: May 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-10833-6
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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