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CITY OF LIGHT

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

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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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