A Nazi U-boat sunk 50 years ago off the Louisiana coast is the catalyst for New Iberia (La.) sheriff's deputy Dave Robicheaux's latest descent into the depths of human nature. Knowing that Dave had found the boat as a boy, drugstore mogul Hippo Bimstine offers him $10,000 to locate it again for salvage. Dave refuses but changes his mind (and ups the price) when he needs money to beat a bum murder rap facing his hired hand, Batist Perry: The rap is being pressed by vindictive New Orleans vice cop Nate Baxter, who is determined to get back at Dave and his PI buddy Clete Purcel. Dave's plan works — it convinces Nate's hard-nosed black sergeant, Lucinda Bergeron, to give information that puts Batist back on the street — but at a terrible price: Dave soon finds himself fighting against sinister club owners Max and Bobo Calucci, who want Clete's girlfriend to work out of taxicabs, and Tommy Lonighan, a typically reflective Burke villain (Dave: "I shouldn't have hit him.... He's a tormented man. The guy's got a furnace in his head") who's dying of prostate cancer but refuses to roll over on the Calucci brothers. But Dave's biggest troubles are still ahead: Magnetic neo-Nazi Will Buchalter (called in by Tommy? by the Caluccis?), determined to locate the U-boat ahead of Hippo, terrorizes Dave's wife, Bootsie, kidnaps and tortures Dave, and keeps disappearing into the sunset after executing his accomplices — all while Max and Bobo are contracting an off-limits kill and Dave's wrestling with Lucinda Bergeron and her main-chance son, Zoot, over the best way to nail the bad guys, avoid selling out, and maybe stay alive. Dave's adventures are usually dominated by a single violent, charismatic heavy. In squeezing Hippo, Tommy, the Caluccis, Will, and Dave himself into one book, Burke cuts himself off from the concentrated power of the masterly In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (1993) but multiplies the possibilities of cathartic violence — and produces his darkest, densest novel yet.
Pub Date: Aug. 4, 1994
ISBN: 0-7868-6019-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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