Vallone has written an often amusing but unoriginal first novel about life and revenge after death among the very, very rich. Henry Somerset, one of America's wealthiest men, wakes up one morning to realize that he is dead. The reclusive financier, whose motto is ``Mine, all mine,'' is able to move around at will, blink himself from one continent to another, and even enter other people's dreams. But he can't remember how he died. An opportunity to exact revenge on those who mistreated him in life presents itself in the person of E.C. Marshall. A businessman almost as eccentric as Henry, E.C. is adopted by Henry's Irish wolfhound, Bozo, and soon acquires Henry's pyramid-like home (complete with bomb shelters and secret rooms), his vast art collection, and his loving assistant, Susan Cleave. With a little help from Bozo, Henry directs E.C. to secret treasures and interests him in the deal that was to be the crown jewel in Henry's career—until he was betrayed by his wife, Harriet, and nephew, Gustavo. The scheme, which involves Henry's partners in the Vatican and the Mafia, will bankrupt Henry's family. Henry loses control when E.C., who has become richer and more unhappy than he ever imagined, is enchanted by an evil opera singer and turns his back on true love. Harriet decides that she wants E.C. and his new wealth herself and is willing to resort to murder. The Vatican and the Mafia try to regain control using the Vatican's secret children and their powers of second sight, but ultimately it is Henry who must face the mystery of his death in order to bring about his own redemption and ease the passage of the others. Vallone's displays of knowledge about everything from Egyptian art to modern finance get long-winded, but when he's not trying to impress, he's often entertaining.
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93765-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
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
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
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