Bright lights, long hours.
Attorney and screenwriter Hogan debuts in print with the tale of a young lawyer who likes Rembrandt and is caught in a story fit for the storyboard.
Our unnamed narrator thinks of poems in terms of skinniness, and he likes to spin around in secretaries’ chairs, but he (miraculously) made Law Review, passed the bar, and got a job. “I know going out at half past midnight before the first day of work is a stupid thing to do,” says he, but he does it anyway, and the next night, too, so that instead of arriving at any of the forms of spiritual potential dangled here (Wicca, Buddhism, Sufism, etc.), he remains fixed in his law-school ways, with contempt for legal success. We witness the hazing that new associates are subjected to, and our narrator’s jealousy when a colleague’s knowledge of some sub-sub-clause allows him to save a deal and endear himself to a partner. And that leaves our narrator with nothing to do in a New York City where you’re either busy or dead. Eventually, he winds up in an affair with the wrong woman—secretary of another partner—and even though it’s not his fault she fell (miraculously) in love with him at first sight, he knows he’s dead meat. The result is twin towers of work usually reserved for paralegals on his desk. And if that’s not enough to depress him, maybe the second-person remembrances of childhood, and an approaching crisis with Dad, will do the trick. What we get here might be what’d happened if Ben left Elaine at the church, took the Alfa off to law school, and got that job in plastics, for “This is the time of day that belongs to the suits; this is the time of day for white collars, the time of day when men who talk in the language of almost-math, a shorthand of numbers and mean analysis, exert themselves with metaphors of jungles and appetites . . . . ”
Bright lights, long hours.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-33693-4
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Delta
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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