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BLESS ME, FATHER

Another Mob book? Tricky fictional terrain, to be sure, but first-timer Kriegel pulls it off by setting his gangster mini-saga in a domesticated, minor key. The wiseguys here are a clutch of real dimwits. It's a testament to New York Daily News columnist Kriegel's ear that he nails so solidly their thick-skulled chatter. Former boxer Frank Battaglia is a perpetual number-two tough guy: He serves his boss, the Fatman, while encouraging cousin Philly Testa to sanction the hit that will crown Philly the new boss and install Frank as his lieutenant. Frank's position in the Family isn't the only thing on his mind. He has a moody teenaged son, Nicky, who's reeling from the suicide of his brother, Buddy. Add to that Frank's two-decade- old memory of his defeat in a career-making boxing bout, along with a New York criminal landscape changing too fast for the old-style mobsters to maintain their influence, and someone's bound to screw up. The Fatman goes down, but Frank leaves a witness, Samantha Broderick, an ex-punk diva and reformed junkie who was the Boss's newest companion. Frank has been forcing Nicky into boxing and away from basketball, where the boy's natural talents lie, and it's Nicky's struggle against his father's violent will that dominates much of the story. Nicky submits to the pugilistic training, but he's a joke in the ring. Yet he does have some wild nights in the sack with Samantha. Frank becomes a media darling, due largely to the Runyonesque dispatches of ink-stained wretch Mushy Flynn, until the Feds compel him to turn state's evidence and go into the witness protection program with his family. Sent ahead, Nicky escapes the safe house and returns to New York, where he and his father confront their common fears. The plot wanders off at the end and barely finds its way back; such a lapse, in an otherwise impressive debut, is easy to forgive.

Pub Date: March 10, 1995

ISBN: 0-385-47494-6

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

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

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