An often entertaining mystery with a satisfying ending despite a few too many subplots.
In Berger’s debut novel, a human-interest journalist for a small New York City weekly finds herself unexpectedly investigating a 14-year-old insurance scam related to the World Trade Center attacks.
Jordan Marshfield writes articles for the magazine Gathering Moss about ordinary people with unusual avocations. Her latest assignment takes her to a prison in upstate New York to interview Giuseppe “The Bishop” Romano, a dying gangster who established an animal rescue foundation before his incarceration. He promises Jordan that he’ll give her a story about Ted Lipman, a man who faked his own death on 9/11, on her next visit, and she quickly becomes obsessed with uncovering the fraud. It’s a personal and emotional journey for Jordan, whose father was one of the 343 firefighters who died that day. Meanwhile, Jordan’s unpleasant ex-husband, Peter, adds domestic turmoil to her life. Back at the prison, Giuseppe admits to Jordan that he helped hide Ted for the first few months, and he tells her that she needs to track down Ted’s best friend, Leonard Legasse; Ted was killed in the Bahamas after collecting the insurance payout, and Leonard has disappeared. Jordan finally connects with Leonard through his daughter, Abby, who’s living in an art commune in Taos, New Mexico. Debut novelist Berger has some tricks up his sleeve for his protagonist, and as the plot twists and turns, Jordan’s relentless pursuit places her and her young daughter, Kristen, in danger. However, it will likely take readers a few chapters to keep the plethora of characters straight—and every one of them is hiding something. The novel is written in two voices: Jordan’s first-person account of the present (in 2015) and a third-person narration for sections set in the past (2001-2002). It’s a device that effectively sprinkles crumbs of disinformation throughout the story and lulls readers into believing they know more than they do. The most sympathetic character is Jordan, but the most interesting one is Leonard—a quirky gentleman who stages beetle fights; he’s also quite a storyteller who’s always shading the truth.
An often entertaining mystery with a satisfying ending despite a few too many subplots.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5424-8986-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: TouchPoint Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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