Farris's latest (Sacrifice, 1994, etc.) opens at a frantic pace, seeming ready to move in two or three different directions, promising action and intrigue, then unexpectedly transforms itself into a sort of southern gothic romance. Dr. Joe Bryce makes his living by seducing and defrauding rich women, using the proceeds to live a carefree life in the Caribbean aboard his yacht. Attractive, likable, and irresistible, he targets only those who seem to ``need'' him and who present something of a challenge. But now he's been tracked down by his latest victim's brutal, vengeful brother and suffered a beating so savage that his face has to be surgically reconstructed. He's also left with no memory of the attack, able to recall only the back-cover photograph on a romance novel being read by a woman (the one who lured him into the trap, but he doesn't remember that). Instead of wanting to exact revenge, however, Joe forms an odd determination to make the romance novelist, Abby Abelard, his own next victim. But the beautiful Abby, left a paraplegic by the long-ago auto accident that killed her fiancÇ, turns out to be a much too easy targetand also a new kind of trapfor the polished predator. The remainder of the story takes place on a steamy, hurricane-threatened South Carolina island where Abby, surrounded by protective relatives and retainers, is using her wealth to rebuild the family mansion while her health deteriorates. Joe, instead of taking his usual role, finds himself cast as the mysterious stranger falling in love with the vulnerable heroine while storm clouds gather, old secrets unravel, and some of the supposed protectors turn out to be anything but. Readers themselves are apt to feel seduced and abandoned when they find that none of the best storylines from the openingor the exciting pacesurvive once the novel passes through the plantation gates. (Literary Guild selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85949-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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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