by Ira Gold ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 30, 2016
Fun stuff, this oddball mating of The Godfather and The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.
In Gold’s debut, small-time Brooklyn hood Howard "Windows" Fenster sells weed and collects vigorish for capo Vinnie Five-Five Spoleto, but Howard’s passion is the Penguin Classics library he inherited from his mob accountant father.
Then Scrunchy Cho, another hoodlum, kills a working girl in Vinnie’s Sheepshead Bay sporting house. That murder ignites a war among Five-Five’s gang, Crazy Bo Moon’s Triad, and Vlad the Impaler’s Brighton Beach Russians. Vinnie’s first casualties are Double Down (shot) and Garlic (pieces stuffed in garbage bags), and so worried Howard, "a half-Jew and as wholly ambivalent," moves out of his sister Judith’s basement. Howard loves Judith, and he’s disappearing to protect her, but he has no place to hide until he meets Ariel, an "ultraconventional girl" in a "pretentious cafe." The love connection’s immediate, and Howard moves into Ariel’s basement while remaining on call for Vinnie. Howard quickly learns well-educated, sophisticated Ariel is obsessed with bondage and sadomasochism, and when she discovers that the monosyllabic and often vulgar Howard is an erudite autodidact rather than the brute of her fantasies, the love affair takes a left turn. Gold has good fun with amoral mobsters like the psychopathic Irish-Italian called IRA, the gluttonous Frankie Hog, and crazy Pauli Bones, who "destroys money in the crematorium of financial idiocy." Dialogue seems spot-on, especially if mob guys rely heavily on f-bombs, but the setting’s more commentary than descriptive. There’s comedy to be had, especially as Howard helps Mrs. Five-Five dispose of a body while contemplating references to Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Irony too, as Howard mopes through a critique of capitalism versus communism, characterizes mob violence as being "as meaningless and pointless as…Vietnam and Iraq," and debates Orwell versus Dostoyevsky with Ivan, the lone Russian mobster who doesn’t want to kill him.
Fun stuff, this oddball mating of The Godfather and The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.Pub Date: June 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-57962-443-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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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