It's not easy to carve out a niche in the increasingly crowded field of legal intrigue, and you have to admire the ingenuity of Warfield's approach: a courtroom mystery with no mystery. Instead, the emphasis is on the endless tactical battles that erupt when Maryland State's Attorney Gardner Lawson (first seen in State v. Justice, 1992) has to put his own son on the stand as the only witness to a brutal double murder. Eight-year-old Granville Lawson saw the two men who gunned down elderly shopkeepers Henry and Addie Bowers, but he has repressed all memory of the incident, and his father's frantic solicitude for the traumatized boy wars with his determination to make Gran finger the killers. It's not that Lawson has no idea who he's after: A telltale footprint identifies one of the perps as local thug Roscoe Miller, and a paper trail leads with almost indecent haste from Miller to Wellington Starke IV, an overaged senior at the tony prep school where Miller used to tend the grounds. But Gardner knows this evidence will never hold up in court. As the Mephistophelean defense lawyer representing Miller and the Starkes' equally vile hired gun fight extradition for Starke, arrange for an incompetent judge who sets a walkaway bail, and chuckle about the mistakes overwrought Gardner is making, the prosecutor's own ex-wife is refusing him visitation rights to Gran, planning to spirit the boy off to Switzerland and interrupting the grand jury proceedings with an emergency custody hearing. Looks like Miller and Starke will walk unless Gran recovers his memory and takes the stand. A legal thriller for lawyers, maybe, or for people who'll take Warfield's infuriatingly dropped subplots—the negligible roles played by Gardner's supportive lover and King's sinister police informant, the toothless threats against Gran when the suspects break free of surveillance—as triumphs of realism over the requirements of popular entertainment.
Pub Date: June 6, 1994
ISBN: 0-446-51725-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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