A classic mob tale with some welcome and unexpectedly fresh notes.
A debut novel blends loss, intrigue, action, and the criminal underworld.
Declan Curtis is truly down on his luck. He still has a great career as part of an international sales operation, wheeling and dealing Oriental rugs on both sides of the Atlantic to great financial success. But he’s recently had a rude awakening from his American dream, as his wife left him for a sailor, making single-malt Scotch his closest companion. Curtis goes through the motions but can scarcely care about anything, even what the collapse of the Soviet Union might portend for his business. When a deal goes bad, however, he meets a mysterious mob boss, referred to only as Uncle, who wants to contract him. Brokering a shady deal with New York–based Russian-Jewish mobsters seems like a suicide mission, but it piques Curtis’ interest and brings back some of his joie de vivre. He soon finds out, however, that you can’t just dip your toes into the murky waters of Mafia dealings; once you’re in, it’s another matter entirely to get out. As he grows more attached to his life and unravels further threads in the underworld, it’s anyone’s guess how long he can last. With elements of noir, thriller, and literary fiction, Jeremiah’s tale offers an intriguing mix, with a first-person narrative voice that allows Curtis to give his perspective and provide context, making the time period really come alive. The prose is often businesslike, and at times readers may want more details on the action and setting of a scene, as in this fistfight: “We went at each other furiously, but briefly. Our companions separated us and we let them.” That said, the minimalistic prose works well with Curtis’ ennui, and the plot moves at a fast pace that should keep readers from lamenting any missing information for long. Add to that the fact that particulars about the Russian mob in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and the international trade of rugs and icons are rarely items of discussion, much less central plot points, in novels, and the book becomes a surprising treat.
A classic mob tale with some welcome and unexpectedly fresh notes.Pub Date: March 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945772-39-9
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Absolutely Amazing Ebooks
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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