A solid historical drama exploring ethical themes, hampered by flawed prose.
A Pennsylvania-set debut novel that spans the 1930s through ’60s with a story of grudges, forgiveness, criminals, and the law.
In South Philadelphia in 1931, some unemployed people line up for a $4 weekly allowance, while others plot crimes instead. Tony Becker ropes 19-year-old Nick Scavello into robbing Jake Moski’s clothing shop; when police officer John Linden hears shots coming from Moski’s, he and his partner run to help. In the ensuing chase, Nick is shot dead, but not before he slashes John in the thigh, causing crippling nerve damage. This opening incident has far-reaching effects: Nick’s brother Al, another petty criminal, vows vengeance on the police; Mark, John’s Drexel University–bound son, harbors bitterness about his father’s injury; and Jake, eager to repay John’s bravery, offers to cover Mark’s college tuition. Mark is the protagonist of the rest of the novel, and as he works his way through law school and marries heiress Gloria Walker, he struggles to abide by his principles. Later, as a district attorney, Pennsylvania governor, and potential presidential candidate, he must resist sketchy propositions from the local crime ring—even when it leads Al and his cronies to threaten his daughter, Susan. Author Charles’ careful research into such details as prices, salaries, and period slang (“He didn’t welsh on any bets and he couldn’t think of anyone who would squeal on him”) lends authenticity to the historical narrative. However, the story’s time jumps feel disjointed; for example, Chapter 3 is set in 1934, Chapter 4 in 1941, and Chapter 6 leaps ahead 13 years. The present-tense narration is a mostly effective strategy, although its lack of consistency (“He pauses, then went on”) is a blot on the style. There are also frequent typos (“it’s you’re fault”; “I guess she feel asleep”), subject-verb agreement issues, and occasionally missing punctuation. However, Charles does maintain the suspense about Susan’s parentage—Mark worries that she’s actually Gloria’s ex-boyfriend Harry St. Clair’s daughter—and about whether Al will pay for his crimes. The unusual title is a metaphor taken from poker: is Mark willing to sacrifice two other people in his race to the top? Or will mercy win out in the end? The book’s gentle, pay-it-forward message—and its unsubtle presentation of the Gospel—gives it the flavor of a morality tale.
A solid historical drama exploring ethical themes, hampered by flawed prose.Pub Date: May 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4959-8252-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2016
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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