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THE BIG NOWHERE

More noir bombast from Ellroy (The Black Dahlia, etc.), who sets this cops, Commies, crooks, and creeps saga in 1950 L.A. When upright, uptight Sheriff's Deputy Danny Upshaw catches the squeal, it's particularly gruesome: someone removed the victim's eyes, ejaculated into the sockets, shredded his back with a "Zoot Stick," then chomped on the innards with wolverine teeth. Three more murders, same M.O., follow, but Danny's investigation is slowed by his assignment to a grand jury team investigating the Commie menace in the UAES (United Alliance of Extras and Stagehands), including rich, nympho Claire DeHaven, her "queer" actor fiance Reynolds Loftis, and their left-wing pals. With HUAC tactics—blackmail, mostly—much of Hollywood's homosexual community is threatened, while the emerging Teamsters Union under Mickey Cohen is bashing heads and panel member Lt. Dudley Smith—with a murder of his own to keep under wraps—is making sure that Danny's investigation goes nowhere. Still, there are leads: to Loftis; to a Hollywood agent who arranged "pansy" parties; to jive musicians; to a plastic surgeon; and to the official Communist Party psychiatrist. Meanwhile, panel members Considine and Meeks have their own agenda: Considine and his wife are wrangling over child-custody; Meeks, a pimp for Howard Hughes, is sleeping with Cohen's girl and has to blow away bent cop Niels to keep it secret. Danny is accused of the murder—and commits suicide rather than submit to a lie detector test that will reveal his homophilia. Out of guilt, Meeks, with the help of Considine, picks up on his homicide investigation and uncovers a tale of homosexual incest, homosexual betrayal, rage, murder, and revenge, all neatly documented by the Commie psychiatrist. Despite all the Commie-baiting, the jive talk, the wisecracks, this is a cop story—too long by at least a third but propelled by a mean, dark vision of the world, with dank, sleazy language. Depressing, with a convoluted beginning, an impossible ending (the psychiatrist's rehash of the case), but there's a truly strong middle at 200 pages. On balance: O.K.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1998

ISBN: 0446674370

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Mysterious Press

Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988

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A LITTLE LIFE

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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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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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