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BROTHERS

Amazing but true: the major upheavals in Soviet-American policy from the Cuban missile crisis to the abortive coup against Gorbachev were all sparked by a monstrous sibling rivalry between two half- brothers, raised half a world apart. The boys are both sons of Soviet-Jewish poet Tanya Gordon, doomed by her membership in an anti-fascist group and by Stalin's relentless anti-Semitism. To save the life of her son Alex, she abandons her condemned husband, poet Victor Wolf, and marries KGB Col. Boris Morozov, who has time to father another son, Dimitri, before Tanya and then Morozov himself are liquidated. Responding to Tanya's dying wish, Morozov sends Alex to Brooklyn to grow up with Tanya's sister Nina Kramer. After endless crosscutting between scenes from the boys' adolescence—Alex is tormented by kids who call his aunt a Red; Dimitri kills a bully who threatens to unmask him as a traitor's son; Alex enrolls in the Sovietology program at Brown; Dimitri trains for the KGB—the two are ready for their momentous collision: CIA agent Franco Grimaldi, eager to recruit Alex, allows Dimitri to find out where he is and lure him to Paris for a meeting; when Dimitri's recalled to Russia, Alex promptly takes his place with his lover Tatiana Romanov; Dimitri finds out and vows revenge; Grimaldi leaks the runaway lovers' location to Dimitri and stands back while Dimitri strangles Tatiana. There's lots more intrigue to come—in fact, ``Afghanistan, Poland, and Star Wars were for [Dimitri] nothing but pawns in...the deadly game he played against his brother''—as Alex and Dimitri keep looking for new ways to kill, maim, or annoy each other, leaving their messy footprints all over foreign policy until the final, ill-advised twist. Former Knesset member Ben-Zohar (The Deadly Document, 1980, etc.), who ought to know better, has written an entertaining, deliriously overscaled, deeply irresponsible spy-soaper. Ah, well, boys will be boys.

Pub Date: May 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-449-90511-X

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993

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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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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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