Backstage Las Vegas provides an appropriately raffish setting for a stylish, twisty first novel, this one featuring a full complement of lovable losers and blackguardly villains. While plying his trade as a shill at Bob's Beer & Guns, a down-market establishment far from the gaming mecca's glitzy Strip, Terry Lasky, a former federal prosecutor and Vietnam vet who prefers the undemanding demimonde to rat-race respectability, learns that an armored car carrying three million dollars skimmed from casino receipts on behalf of the Chicago mob has been hijacked. Although indifferent to the fate of the Cosa Nostra's ill-gotten gains, he's soon obliged to bear a hand in its recovery. The sole surviving bandit storms into Bob's in search of legal aid and whispers something to Lasky, then is gunned down by staked-out police and Louis Stalisi—a sleek but slow-witted yuppie envoy from the Windy City's underworld. With both the cops and the robbers convinced that Lasky knows where the loot is stashed, he sets about making the best deal possible in the circumstances. As he scuttles about Las Vegas, the marked man must treat with shifty characters like a local detective, known as Grinder, whose loyalties are decidedly variable. Lasky's lady (a Camus-reading hooker from Malaysia who answers to the name of Snapper) and ex-wife (an unreconstructed radical left over from the '60s) also display a keen interest in the whereabouts of the Mafia money, as do a defrocked Yale economist, a Pentecostal pastor, the wheelchair- bound proprietor of Bob's, and BB&G's once-homeless bouncer. But by the time Lasky arranges for the plunder's return at a midnight rendezvous deep in the desert, his best-laid schemes go spectacularly—and satisfyingly—awry. An impressive debut, one reminiscent of the work of Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake for the way it effectively combines antic action with sardonic commentary.
Pub Date: Nov. 22, 1995
ISBN: 1-56980-052-9
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Barricade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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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