Readers would be wise to invest in the journeys of this lovable, well-loved narcissist.
Mad Men meets Wall Street in Helms’ (Coming to Terms with Wall Street, 2000) novel, heavily invested in sex, booze and shady brokerage deals.
It’s the middle of the 1960s, and Garvey Hatch is a young investment gunslinger on the rise. He has a business degree from Harvard, a wife, kids and a wandering sexual libido. On the day his wife, Lil, catches him cheating with a neighbor, he gets a job offer from a burgeoning investment corporation, Winston & Quarles. He’s always been an ambitious person, and W&Q seems like the quickest route to his dream of financial success. So he packs up his family, Lil included, and moves to the corporate headquarters in Kansas City. When he’s not drinking scotch or screwing another girl from the office, Garvey is jet-setting to Los Angeles, Las Vegas or New York to check on new investment opportunities. Of course, with the changes in scenery, there’s plenty of sex and alcohol, but Garvey is also very good at his job, and he quickly jumps into “doubling a thousand only ten times and getting a million.” All the while, he tries to take an analyst’s advice: “Don’t ever let them catch you working….But work a lot.” “You never let them see you sweat; you shake your head and smile when a punch lands,” Garvey says. His highs are a fun ride, though one knock against them is a shortage of lows to add contrast. Nonetheless, Garvey manages to be a charming egotist, even as he shorts his friends and family. Helms’ prose snaps like a whip with spot-on reflections of the free-swinging broker lifestyle: “[W]e are not patient enough to go out and start companies in the hope we get the one-in-a-million hit. We’re pirates, not pig farmers.” The writing tends to dip, however, when the narrative steps into sentimentality, but the fun, debauchery and financial scheming overpower the weaker sections.
Readers would be wise to invest in the journeys of this lovable, well-loved narcissist.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484161104
Page Count: 306
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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