A moody and intricate postCold War thriller from Robinson (The Dark Beyond the Stars, 1991, etc.) and the pseudonymous Hull, this one centered on an aging spy who wrestles with years of guilt and self-doubt. Vietnam vet Neal Morley, now a US agent specializing in counterterrorism, travels to Brussels to interview an old puppet- maker with a big story to tellnamely, that he helped smuggle into the country seven people he now thinks are terrorists. Unfortunately, however, the old man is murdered before Morley can get all the details. Working then with the puppeteer's adopted daughter, Hannie de Vries, Morley tries to track down the terrorists, who, he figures, killed in order to cover their tracks. As it happens, Morley's taken this assignment for reasons of revenge: In the same city six months before, he exposed a major drug ring and was nearly killed himself; despite what his superiors insist, Morley's sure the ring wasn't completely dismantled and that his would-be assassin is still waiting. Physically weakened and emotionally scarred, Morley walks the cold and drab streets of Brussels, thinking back with profound regret over things he's seen and done through his lifeVietnam war atrocities, murders, people used and discarded, sometimes his own complicity. He's so unnerved and regretful that he wonders whether he's lost his edgea topic his fellow agents gleefully discuss in his presence. After the terrorists make several attempts on his life, Morley hooks up with a Russian agent, Vasiliev, who's also trailing them. When de Vries is kidnapped, Morley begins to piece together the links between the terrorists, the drug ring, his near-death six months ago, and a missing Russian scientist Vasiliev desperately needs to find. Throughout, Morley struggles to create some small justice in atonement for past sins. Unsentimental and taut. An updated version of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, though not quite as dark.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85967-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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