The Postman Always Rings Twice Revisited and with happy results, though Conner (Blood Moon, 1987) doesn't offer the quality of originality and discovery that abounded in James M. Cain's sex- driven, Depression-era tough-guy classic—and perhaps a heroine as sharply outlined as Cain's Cora Papadakis. Tequila-popping, joint-smoking Winn Cahill, a none-too-bright but plenty bitter guitarist, smolders under a huge torch for his old mistress Liana, who still lives back in his Central Valley California home, has married upscale, and been violently widowed (did her husband commit suicide or did she shoot him?). Winn tends to see Liana everywhere and explode emotionally. After one such explosion, he heads home, runs into Liana at a July Fourth party, reignites when she asks him to dance with her—and then finds himself taking the fall for her when she shoots her latest lover in the back when he discovers her in bed with Winn and threatens Winn with a knife. Did Liana set Winn up? Did her brutal lover have something to do with her husband's death? She and Winn sink the body in a river and run the lover's truck into a deep area upriver. Winn winds up bumming in Mexico, waiting for Liana to sell her ranch and join him with the cash that will ensure their getaway into new identities. Will she really come? For a brief moment the lovers (?) feel paradise about to roll over them—but Winn is jailed by Mexican police, battered, loses an eye, falls into the Mexican/American criminal-justice system, and is extradited—the technology of criminal law being another Cain joy. The climax in steamy New Orleans has high excitement. Without Cain's visceral hook, though the story builds to a strong payoff. But how can a musician go through a whole novel without one thought about music?
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1991
ISBN: 1-55611-302-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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