Shifting his restless intercontinental gaze from the American desert of Six Miles to Roadside Business (1990) to Europe and Africa, Doane finds more fertile ground in this dark, twisting tale of mayhem and torture involving a Paris-based human-rights organization. Africa looms large in the saga, a mysterious, distant land, as monitor Thomas Zane—son of a bomb-throwing 60's radical confined to a mental hospital—receives a transmission in Paris from one of his undercover ``rakers'' that his friend, another informant code- named Eleven, has died. The message sets in motion a desperate chain of events; Zane carries the word to Eleven's lover, also the wife of a prominent African poet-turned-ardent-revolutionary, only to have her die within minutes of seeing him. Fired from his job for having supposedly sold out to those who kill, he is stalked on the streets and through his computer links, and has to vanish into the Parisian demimonde in order to survive. Zane slowly realizes that an insidious torturer tracked by Eleven for years from Southeast Asia across Africa, who uses a combination of mind- bending drugs to extract information fully—leaving victims euphoric, memory-impaired, and with a crown of surgical scars—is at work in Mali, and that he is also responsible for everything happening to Zane in France. Discovering that Eleven is not dead but hiding in a Mali village of blind people, he goes to him, with the torturer at his heels; a confrontation between them, which includes the poet, ensues—and Zane has to face the limits of his nonviolent convictions. More compelling than its predecessor and much closer to a mainstream thriller. The suspense fades in the end, but even so this is a taut, tantalizing yarn in which high-tech hanky-panky, the politics of African liberation, and human-rights concerns coalesce.
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-58107-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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 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
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