An admirable but too-squeaky-clean protagonist in a story that capably manages its contentious subject matter.
In first-time novelist McBride’s dramatic thriller, a successful businessman is shocked when his troubled teenage son accuses him of molestation.
Shane Connelly has made something of himself, a young hooligan–turned–college graduate now launching his own high-tech firm, Parallax Café Technology. His home life, however, is a different story. Both his wife, Tara, and teenage son, Nick, have mental problems, exacerbated by Tara’s heavy drinking and Nick’s frequent drug use. Shane, fed up with Nick’s late-night partying and family cars mysteriously vanishing only to turn up again, finally kicks him out of the house. That same day, Tara files a restraining order against Shane; Nick, it seems, has alleged that Shane’s been molesting him. Shane has believers in daughters Jaclyn and Caitlyn Joyce and his sister Katie, but he faces an uphill battle, struggling with the charges and confusion over why his son would accuse him of such things. The novel sometimes terrifies, showing how a simple allegation can make a person appear guilty. One of the cops who interrogates Shane, for instance, threatens him, while most people, even those supporting Shane, warn him that he’ll almost certainly be killed in prison. McBride ably develops sympathy for his protagonist, perhaps a little too well. Anticipation gradually diminishes as the case against Shane becomes increasingly rickety, especially with schizophrenic paranoid Tara as the only person who fully believes Nick’s claim. The story gives Shane a chance at romance with Lia, a woman he meets just before his troubles begin. He falls in love a little too fast—“Could she be the one?” he thinks, before Lia’s even talked about herself—but scenes with the two, as well as Jaclyn and CJ, are welcome reprieves from Shane’s tirelessly proclaiming his innocence. The story takes place in 2001, beginning months before 9/11, but McBride doesn’t allow the tragedy to be a mere backdrop. Shane and Lia’s helping others at ground zero, in fact, solidifies their relationship. The ending is predictable but absolutely satisfying, and Shane even earns a surprising, unlikely ally along the way.
An admirable but too-squeaky-clean protagonist in a story that capably manages its contentious subject matter.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1483421971
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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