by Jon Buchan ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2012
High moral tone, low narrative appeal.
Corruption, Southern style: Good-old-boy power brokers are challenged by an idealistic newspaper publisher in this lumbering debut.
Buck Ravenel learned how the world works at his exclusive prep school. As a squeaky-clean prefect he had reported his roomie to the headmaster for an infraction. The headmaster finessed matters, pressuring the roomie’s father for a donation. Everybody won; favors trumped rules; the titular Code had been observed. Now, in 1995, Buck is a powerful state senator in South Carolina, and his son Tripp is director of the state’s environmental agency. When a phosphate company applies for a permit to strip-mine near Georgetown, on the coast, and his agency’s in-house report is negative, Tripp has it deep-sixed. Like father, like son. There will be a sweet business deal if the permit is approved; Buck and his partners will profit. Just one problem: A young black paralegal has obtained the original report and passed it to the local paper, on condition his identity is protected. The paper runs the story. Buck sues, seeking millions in damages. It’s time for Wade McNabb, the crusading publisher, to enlist the help of Kate Stewart, an equally idealistic lawyer. Let battle commence! Unfortunately, it doesn’t. First we must plow through Wade and Kate’s back stories. Wade’s father had been a hero, standing up for black folks, losing the paper after an advertisers’ boycott, and eventually killing himself. Kate’s dad had been a successful tobacco buyer who became consumed with guilt once the lung cancer connection became clear. So the high-minded dead loom large over a couple destined for each other, though not quite yet. They spend a day on a remote beach, but he’s the perfect gentleman and she’s the perfect lady, making for a perfect snooze. The judge in the long-delayed courtroom scenes is a good old hunting buddy of Buck, so the fix is in. Will right over might prevail?
High moral tone, low narrative appeal.Pub Date: May 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9841073-5-3
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Joggling Board Press
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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