Sanders's name, like that of the aging Bela Lugosi, has lately become a virtual guarantee of incompetence. Here, his dogged tour of the Decalogue continues with a tale of murder, theft, and assorted lesser crimes that would be sub par for anyone else but that's no lower than his recent average. Brainy, dumpy insurance-investigator Dora Conti is pulled away from her loving Hartford hubby Mario to see whether one of the beneficiaries of jewelry colossus Lewis Starrett's $3 million policy may have stabbed him to death. The big questions here are: (1) Which of the Starrett survivors and hangers-on looks the most suspicious-widow Olivia, dazzled by "Father" Brian Gallaway; daughter Felicia, hooked on drugs and con-man Turner Pierce; son Clayton, big-time adulterer (with Turner's sister Helene) and importer of gold; or Clayton's charity-ball wife Eleanor, a stranger to sex for the years since her miscarriage? (2) Will Dora solve the mystery, by engaging a scruffy computer-hacker and poring over the evidence until she notices details that have been screaming at the most comatose readers, before the entire cast is killed off? (3) How many murderers can fit between the covers of one book (four fatal stabbings are committed by four different people)? (4) Will Dora submit to the blandishments of N.Y.C. policeman John Wenden (who doesn't just want a quickie—it's something more than that) or be true to Mario? (5) When will Sanders stop wrapping his well-observed portraits of predatory greed in the mystery-detective trappings he still hasn't mastered? You might want to know that nobody does time for any of those four murders, and Dora, headed back to Mario, recommends the big-ticket claim be paid in full. Ironic.
Pub Date: April 15, 1991
ISBN: 9994602748
Page Count: -
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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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