Strange amorous encounters underscore the dissolute Rilke’s appeal, but the reasons for his dogged sleuthing remain a...
A debut crime novel with aspirations, featuring a quintessential flawed hero, a smart and morally ambivalent gay Glaswegian auctioneer.
Rilke’s fixations are far from noble when he first enters the McKindless place, a gloomy townhouse complete with a sharp-eyed spinster seeking a quick sale of her just-deceased brother’s belongings. Rilke’s auction house, long-established in Glasgow but a good deal seedier than Sotheby’s, hasn’t seen quality of the kind he’s being offered in a generation, so he swallows his questions and proceeds with business. While going through the brother’s private office in the attic, at the spinster’s request, Rilke finds an envelope full of pornographic photos featuring the deceased, decades younger, but Rilke’s blood congeals at the sight of some of them, since they seem to depict real torture and worse. He opens an investigation of his own—after being picked up in a police raid of a gay hotspot and saved by an old chum on the force, only to help another old chum, now a drug dealer, move his stash to a more secure location after he’s been raided. The search takes him to a porno-film producer, then to a would-be actress running a private peepshow; the deeper in Rilke gets, the more repulsed and fascinated. Even after the actress reveals that McKindless had engaged her for a necrophilia photo shoot, and suggested “cutting” her, Rilke still doesn’t take what he knows to his friend the policeman. Something keeps him digging until a brush with death, more tangible evidence of McKindless’s evil deeds, and action from beyond the grave threaten to bring the unspeakable horrors of the past to life again.
Strange amorous encounters underscore the dissolute Rilke’s appeal, but the reasons for his dogged sleuthing remain a mystery, making him a shadowy figure as frustrating as he is fascinating to observe.Pub Date: March 19, 2003
ISBN: 1-84195-280-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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