The Marx Brothers meet the mob; recommended especially for readers who grew up in the Bronx.
A comic crime caper debut novel, set in the Bronx in the late 1950s, features an engaging hero and a large cast of characters with nicknames such as “Sally Bats,” “Nicky Eyes,” and “Shmoogie.”
The story’s protagonist and narrator is known simply and aptly as “New Einstein.” He’s bright, resourceful, and likable, lives with his beloved grandmother, and is always willing to take a chance and make a buck. His only exposure to formal education was an accounting course, and he was brilliant at it. A corrupt cop—in this book, seemingly everyone is corrupt—gets him entrée to the mob at Mafioso Vinnie Ruggiero’s auto-wrecking yard. Soon he’s indispensable and gets noticed by Dom, the boss himself, who gives the young man various challenges to test his mettle and loyalty. These include moving a shipment of guns to Ireland, blackmailing a city commissioner who’s obstructing the mob’s interests, and finally, pulling off a diamond heist. During the last task, the protagonist takes it upon himself to sideline his mortal enemy, Nicolo DeMatta (the aforementioned “Nicky Eyes”), a favorite of Dom’s. Along the way, he also meets Merri Steagal, a blond Southern belle from Mississippi, and is instantly smitten, although it turns out that she’s working for Nicky. At the end, New Einstein, his grandmother, and Merri celebrate Christmas morning at Krum’s, a Bronx ice cream parlor. Overall, this book is clever, witty, and fast-moving. The caper setups are unbelievably elaborate and almost mesmerizing in their detail. One, in which the main characters set out to foil a crack squad of tax agents from Albany, is Byzantine in its complexity; author Stein is an accountant himself, and he must be a fearfully good one. In another, the comic situation is similarly elaborate and well-played, involving flatulence and other crudity. There are also some clever lines, such as “The carrot was cold, hard cash. The stick was cold, hard stick.”
The Marx Brothers meet the mob; recommended especially for readers who grew up in the Bronx.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5323-5364-2
Page Count: 328
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2018
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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