Don’t care for lawyers? Then you’ll love this tale of how a down-on-his-luck attorney’s slide to destruction is greased by his own legal counsel. Despite a fat trust fund and a trophy wife, San Francisco lawyer Jack Darwin is in trouble. His marriage is on the skids, since shy, bookish Darwin shares only one interest with vivacious Karla, and they hardly ever indulge that one anymore. Karla’s spending habits have made a big dent in Darwin’s trust fund, whose principal won’t get turned over to him for another ten years. And his first foray into criminal defense will come a cropper as soon as the judge hears Darwin’s hopelessly amateurish motion to dismiss. But as Darwin is sitting over still another bourbon bemoaning his fate, a fairy godmother appears in the form of David Avila, a fellow attorney who helps the other lawyer redraft his motion, points him toward some lucrative criminal defense work, and takes him under his wing. Darwin doesn’t know that his new friend, fresh from Karla’s bed, has already been plotting ways to relieve him of wife, home, and trust fund. So even as Darwin thinks he’s taking the first steps toward a new life with law- student Dolores Hernandez, he’s in fact following the footprints his fairy godmother has laid out for him—prints that lead to a messy divorce amid allegations of assault, a hopelessly compromised reputation, and, inevitably, the hot seat in a murder trial, with Avila on hand to run Darwin’s defense into the ground. Dold (Schedule Two, 1996, etc.) presents Darwin’s bumpy descent with easy empathy for this flawed, gentle man, but also, regrettably, with a complete lack of surprise. It’s fun for a while to watch diabolical Avila sink his client deeper and deeper into the muck, but even when the worm begins to turn, the revelations that will save Jack are as predictable as the villainy. Still, this is a sturdy nightmare for readers who love lawyers, and a satisfying revenge fantasy for readers who don’t.
Pub Date: Feb. 22, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-19257-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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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