In a disappointing if suspenseful sequel to Ablow’s Denial (1997), a forensic psychiatrist puts his life on the line to quell a revolt in a hospital for the criminally insane. Slasher-killer plastic-surgeon Dr. Trevor Lucas, declared insane by a jury, is sentenced to a Massachusetts mental hospital. Forensic psychiatrist Frank Clevenger, who helped bring Lucas to justice, knows that he didn’t kill anyone, but that, even so, the bad doctor is over the edge, having begun to mutilate his right arm, claiming that it’s possessed by the devil. Clevenger suffers from guilt about the verdict and tries to assuage it with Cynthia, a sweetly loving call girl. But before such healing can begin, Lucas leads a riot in a mental ward crammed with psychokillers, taking as hostages a handful of staffers, including a pregnant nurse. Lucas tosses the hideously butchered body of a female inmate out a fifth floor window and demands an escape helicopter—and a Catholic priest. After a Harvard psychologist sent to negotiate is stabbed to death, Lucas demands that Clevenger join him in the ward. Still guilt-racked but determined to help, Clevenger walks into the lion’s den hoping he can use his none-too-competent psychotherapeutic skills to heal Lucas. After proudly displaying his unbearably gruesome surgical battle with Satan, Lucas hints that his pathology may have something to do with his childhood in Baltimore. Clevenger halts a SWAT team raid on the hospital, then is released by Lucas to find whatever it is that’s been buried in Lucas’s past and with it cure him. If he doesn—t, Lucas will kill everyone in the ward, including himself, in 24 hours. Alas, just as Clevenger hops the first flight for Baltimore, Cynthia at his side, the psychokiller responsible for the deaths Lucas is being blamed for escapes from a cushy mental institution and goes on a rampage. Gore galore with wildly improbable plot twists, while Ablow’s worthy premise—that evil can be vanquished when empathic individuals confront their inner demons—fails to convince.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-44212-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
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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