Gritty and fun, with a surprisingly rewarding finish, this dark comedy entertains throughout.
A bumbling, Canadian ne’er-do-well painfully learns to find his way in Meade’s debut novel.
After years of aimless living punctuated only by occasional run-ins with the law, limo driver Marty Drysdale meets the girl of his dreams when she pulls him over for speeding. Opposites attract as Marty finds himself irresistibly drawn to Chick, a steely, crimson-haired Mountie with a “cold, clear face and blue eyes that looked right through you,” and Chick eventually falls for Marty’s ambitionless, down-to-earth demeanor and agrees to marry him. Not long after joining households, however, their innate differences drive the two apart, and Chick leaves their native Calgary after learning Marty can’t father a child. Years later, Chick, no longer a Mountie, limps back to town unannounced, sporting a prosthetic leg, a young daughter, Susan, and a new husband, John “FitZ” Fitzgerald, the scheming partner Marty had first introduced her to while Marty and Chick were still married. Chick’s return shifts this heavily plot-driven narrative into overdrive, when Marty again takes up with FitZ, and FitZ clandestinely concocts the hair-brained scheme that Marty will write a screenplay based on robberies found in Chick’s old case files. Trouble ensues when FitZ enlists the backing of some big-league thugs he plans to simply defraud, and then he coerces Marty into re-enacting the old robberies with him—hence the work’s title—with results not unlike those in a Coen brothers’ film. Though there are humorous moments—particularly as Marty and FitZ practically kill themselves during their hijinks—by story’s end, Meade’s plot grows increasingly convoluted and threatens to dwarf the compelling character development at the heart of the tale. In a refreshing twist, young Susan helps spark a redemptive softening of Marty’s wizened heart and exposes the work’s theme in describing the kinds of movies she likes—namely those where “the alien turns into a different being to trick you…but you know that underneath it is still the same alien coming to get you.”
Gritty and fun, with a surprisingly rewarding finish, this dark comedy entertains throughout.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2009
ISBN: 978-0595635702
Page Count: 244
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
