A rambling and lackluster second effort by Shepherd (Henry’s List of Wrongs, 2002), fleshed out with predictable situations...
An unexciting midwestern version of All the King’s Men follows a young man’s struggle to uncover (and conceal) the shady truths about his dead father.
Cleveland has its fair share of shady grafters in City Hall—and Joe Way should know. His father, Joseph Sr. is the mayor, and Joe Jr. is helping Dad fight off challenger Lester Ratcovic in one of the sleaziest municipal campaigns since Richard Daley went on to his great reward. A onetime college football star who got his start in politics by setting up a new Browns franchise in Cleveland, Joe Jr. is Assistant DA and heir presumptive to the Way dynasty. He is also a self-righteous prig keenly sensitive to the failings of others and not above playing dirty when it suits his purposes. When a teenaged girl comes to him with a story of how she was sexually harassed by Ratcovic, Joe urges her to go public with her tale—and to conceal the fact that they ever met. The uproar that ensues kills Ratcovic’s campaign and erupts into full-blown scandal when the girl is found beaten to death. Does Joe have any regrets? Not at first—until he discovers that his father has been conducting a longtime affair behind his mother’s back. As if that weren’t shock enough, Joe’s father dies the very day after Joe catches him in flagrante delicto. Joe narrates his story into a tape recorder as he desperately rehearses the eulogy he’ll have to deliver at the funeral. As he struggles to make sense of his father’s life, he is helped by an older brother who has recently come out of the closet and an ex-girlfriend who works for a left-wing paper that was investigating Joe’s father. Which is better, ignorance or disillusion?
A rambling and lackluster second effort by Shepherd (Henry’s List of Wrongs, 2002), fleshed out with predictable situations and two-dimensional characters: feels flat and formulaic.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-6626-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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