For Klempner (Irreparable Damage, 2002), any point worth making is worth beating to death, and the early stages of this...
A retired judge is lured from his South Carolina hermitage to handle one last appeal for a Death Row inmate.
Sound familiar? Wait, you can predict even more details, as the judge himself instantly succeeds in doing. Hon. August Jorgenson was a celebrated opponent of the death penalty before he stepped down and into the hermit-like oblivion of his Outer Banks lighthouse (no computer, no phone, barely any mail). The advocates pressing for his involvement, director/anchor Jessica Woodruff and her colleagues at the upstart Trial TV network, are more interested in ratings than justice. The accused, Wesley Boyd Davies, is an autistic African-American, a prodigiously gifted artist who can speak barely a word, convicted 15 years ago of raping and killing his 11-year-old neighbor Ilsa Meisner in execution-happy Virginia. A parade of lawyers has run methodically through every last grounds for appeal save one: “Could a competent, sane, non-retarded individual, who was nonetheless incapable of understanding the connection between his criminal act and his execution, be put to death without violating the Eighth Amendment?” It all sounds like pretty recondite stuff until Jorgenson, agreeing to argue the case before the Supreme Court, finds evidence that strongly suggests his client is innocent, with confirmation (though no evidence he can take into court) readily available. The discovery would make Boy Davies’s day if he could understand it, but there’s no joy at Trial TV, where Jorgenson’s claim of actual innocence, which could fatally undermine their crusade against capital punishment, turns the grizzled justice into a potential liability. Wonder what will happen next?
For Klempner (Irreparable Damage, 2002), any point worth making is worth beating to death, and the early stages of this opus, which seem determined to mine the fog for every metaphoric possibility, are slow-going. Once the story kicks in, however, it proceeds to its foreordained conclusion with pleasing brio.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31067-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dunne/Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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
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
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