A promising storyline that falls victim to disappointing writing and editing.
In Wilder’s debut novel, a respected Houston cardiologist is convicted of killing her mother with an unapproved drug, but some begin to question whether she’s actually guilty of the crime.
Dr. Lindsey McCall successfully modifies a digitalis drug that she hopes will save the lives of patients with heart failure, including her own mother. But when Ann McCall dies, Houston police receive an anonymous tip claiming that Lindsey used the drug to kill her. Officials exhume the body, find the unapproved medication in her system, and try Lindsey for murder. She’s convicted and sentenced to two years in prison. The story draws the attention of newspaper reporter Kate Townsend, who plans an investigative series titled “Murder in the Texas Medical Center.” During her research, she’s disturbed to learn that Lindsey’s older sister, a nurse named Paula Livingston, testified against her and is pleased that Lindsey’s in Huntsville Prison. The new chief warden, Rich Jansen, also finds himself interested in Lindsey’s case—and in her. The author offers a solid premise and a fair amount of suspense, and some of her characters—particularly Jansen and Lindsey’s friend Julie—are quite well-drawn. Unfortunately, these good points are overshadowed by the fact that many sentences are awkward and amateurish, such as, “His curiosity had been piqued by these last remarks of Lindsey about her family.” The author’s use of stiff, academic language is another weakness; for example, Lindsey is said to have “persuaded her chemistry and biology teachers to support her determination to alter the digitalis molecule in ways that would optimize its inotropic or strengthening effects on the heart.” The reporter’s subplot seems particularly outlandish, as her poorly written articles win not one, but three Pulitzer Prizes. The novel could also have used a stronger copy edit to catch spelling errors (“tenants” instead of “tenets,” “coy” instead of “koi”).
A promising storyline that falls victim to disappointing writing and editing.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-163063261
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Tate Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2015
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
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