An overlong but often engrossing novel.
In Dahlberg’s (Uptown and Down, 2005) novel, a successful Wall Street trader humiliatingly loses her job and is forced to reconsider her life.
At 35, Mia Lewis is the head of equities at Atlas Capital and the only African-American female trader in a crew of 18. She has an enviable career, and after her firm safely lands on the other side of the 2008 financial crisis, her future looks bright. However, she’s at loggerheads with a new underling, Tripp Armsden, a cocksure jerk who buys a huge position in an unfamiliar company, Touchnology Systems—a recklessly risky bet made without Mia’s approval. She orders Tripp to unload it when its stock price dangerously dips, but he defies her; meanwhile, her boss, Atlas founder Peter Branco, supports Tripp for reasons that she doesn’t grasp. The antagonism between Mia and Tripp—which Dahlberg depicts with nuance—finally erupts into heated conflict when Peter inexplicably decides to promote Tripp to head of equities, making him Mia’s boss. Mia refuses to accept this and presents Peter with an ultimatum—either Tripp goes, or she does. To her anguished surprise, he chooses the latter option and fires her. To add insult to injury, her incensed reaction makes the financial news. Professionally ruined, she realizes that she’s mismanaged her personal finances so egregiously that she’ll soon deplete her meager savings. She sublets her apartment and goes to live rent-free in a friend’s cottage in upstate New York. There, she meets and falls in love with handsome wine-shop owner Oliver Bishop, but his unresolved relationship with his ex-wife complicates their potential future. Meanwhile, Mia isn’t yet done with the world of finance: She aims to sue Atlas for wrongful termination, and in the process, she uncovers troubling information about her ouster. Throughout this novel, Dahlberg intelligently captures the precarious position of a black woman in the white, testosterone-fueled world of New York high finance. She also limns with great subtlety the potentially destructive charms of unchecked careerism: Mia is shown to be so focused on professional advancement and the trappings of success that she almost completely neglects the details of her personal life—including her own finances. With notable skill, Dahlberg shows how the pursuit of elite accomplishment can trap a person in a gilded cage. However, the plot’s pace is often plodding; the author dawdles far too long on incidental details and inessential subplots, which can sometimes make for a lethargic read. Nevertheless, Dahlberg seamlessly combines two very different types of books—a romance novel and a financial thriller—and imbues the result with suspense and emotional depth. What holds the two parts together as a coherent whole is Mia’s process of self-discovery; even as she fights to restore her name and reputation, she reflects deeply on the circumstances of her life. One gets the feeling early on that even if Mia returns to Wall Street, she won’t be her former self, and this aspect gives the story additional dimension.
An overlong but often engrossing novel.Pub Date: July 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77342-050-9
Page Count: 342
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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