by Harold Robbins ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 29, 2003
Which industry’s next? Ghostwriting?
Robbins’s fifth postmortal work again alternates splendid pulp with thudding prose.
Each Robbins epic features a new venue for bottomless greed. Sin City (2002) took us behind the scenes at Vegas, Never Enough into the secrets of Wall Street and illegal trading, and The Secret into Victoria’s Secret with its nose deep into thongs and Brazilian wax jobs. The mistitled Heat of Passion (it should be Cold Passion) has its stunningly well-written passages (for a Robbins novel) about the secrets of the diamond industry, quite haunting passages of research afloat on a steaming sea of sex, all of it blood-pounding, pelvic, and vulgar. It’s breakfast with a Cartier or Harry Winston catalogue while gobbling a stack of buttery sugared cinnamon toast. Win Liberte was born in a taxicab on the afternoon Kennedy died. His gem of a mother dies when he’s young, and he’s raised by his grandfather and father, who buy rough diamonds wholesale on 47th Street and sell them as cut stones. Dad remarries, and Win now has an older stepbrother, Leo, who delights in evaluating diamonds while Win cares nothing for the industry. When Dad dies, Win inherits a business handled for him by his uncle and stepbrother while hormonal Win devotes himself to boats and “clits.” But when Uncle loses the company funds and Leo rips him off, Win is left penniless, with all his property under lien—except for a diamond mine in Angola that no one will buy because of the Angolans’ endless civil strife. Win heads for the mine, makes a go of it against vastly bloody odds, then finds himself facing the worldwide De Beers monopoly. “Harold’s” grossest scene is hard to choose, though a standout is Win’s pronging the 18-year-old daughter of his former lover when the mother, who’d once tried to kill him, walks in and wraps her cold fingers around his tool: “My blood ignited and I felt the lead rising in my pencil.”
Which industry’s next? Ghostwriting?Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30002-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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