Collins clearly wants to be Mickey Spillane, and there’s plenty of blazing .45 action to satisfy lovers of that sort of...
The Angel of Death is dead, but his spirit of vengeance lives on in his war-hero son, back to get revenge on the Chicago Outfit—again.
We’re now in the middle stretch of the trilogy that Collins spun out of his 1998 graphic novel, Road to Perdition (dourly filmed four years later by Sam Mendes, with Tom Hanks and Paul Newman), then wrote into a novelization. With this sequel (to be concluded, we’re told, with Road to Paradise), Collins extends the story of the O’Sullivan clan, previously decimated by mob warfare and now represented only by Michael O’Sullivan, adopted and given the last name Satariano, and still remembering what Capone’s henchmen did to his family. Michael grew up to be just as much a stone-cold killer as his old man, as proven in the story’s bloody introduction, set on Bataan, where Michael guns down a division’s worth of Japanese soldiers. He loses an eye but gains a Medal of Honor and honorable discharge back to the states, where he doesn’t lose any time getting into the mix. Papa Satariano gets him a meeting with Capone’s right-hand man, Frank Nitti, who welcomes the very useful Michael into the belly of the Outfit. Simultaneously, Michael is supposed to be doing his civic duty, as laid out for him during a meeting with Eliot Ness—star of a series of pulp novels that Collins wrote some years ago—who wants help breaking up the Outfit led by Capone from his Florida mansion. A long flashback fills in background on Michael’s family origins back in Rock Island, and it’s a pleasant relief from Collins’s tiresome way, elsewhere, of imagining Michael as a rock-jawed, two-dimensional caricature.
Collins clearly wants to be Mickey Spillane, and there’s plenty of blazing .45 action to satisfy lovers of that sort of thing. But without the robotic Michael possessing a single human emotion, it’s hard to care much what happens.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-054027-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
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
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Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of...
Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest (Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State.
Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Tully becomes Seattle’s answer to Oprah. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah. The BFFs are sundered. Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. Just as Kate develops a spine, she’s given some devastating news. Will the friends reconcile before it’s too late?
Dated sermonizing on career versus motherhood, and conflict driven by characters’ willed helplessness, sap this tale of poignancy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36408-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
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