A bleak, familiar tale of love and desperation.
In this debut crime novel, a man tries to care for his dying wife while rescuing a woman from the Venetian mob.
An unnamed American and his terminally ill wife, Cheryl, have moved to Venice in order to await her end surrounded by the world’s most gorgeous city—though the extent to which her cancer has emptied their savings has forced them into a rather drab apartment building. The situation is taking its toll on the tale’s brooding narrator, a former Marine, who is stretched to the limit emotionally and is dreading what his life will be like after his wife is gone. The one bright spot is their neighbor Sophie, a tall, beautiful, mysterious woman whom Cheryl befriends, though it isn’t long before the veteran discovers the woman’s secret. “She’s bad news, mate,” he hears from a friend, an Australian bartender. “Belongs to Old Don Verdicchio,” a local Mafia boss involved in “whatever bad stuff makes the man money.” The ex-Marine, who has his own experience working with organized criminals, takes it upon himself to save Sophie from her situation. With Cheryl’s approval, the couple move Sophie into their own apartment in order to hide her from the reach of Don Verdicchio. As the don retaliates, the veteran realizes he may not be able to save both Cheryl and Sophie, but this fact may be something his wife has realized all along. McLean, in shaping his narrator’s prose, deftly summons all the noirish pathos of the classic detective genre: “For a second that stretched into eternity an internal voice tried to speak to me in a different language. One of logic....So I crushed it into a ball so small that I could barely hear it anymore and went downstairs.” The premise is inherently compelling, but the protagonist’s blunt, alcoholic chivalry isn’t completely convincing, nor is Cheryl’s saintly selflessness. Sophie, who rarely speaks, feels more like a pet than a fully developed person. Even so, fans of the genre will likely enjoy this mood piece, which delivers the requisite violence and tragedy in a picturesque Venetian setting.
A bleak, familiar tale of love and desperation.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945734-15-1
Page Count: 222
Publisher: New Pulp Press
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2018
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
