For the first two-thirds of his new novel, Smith (Due North, 1992, etc.) can't decide whether he's writing a study of one man's Vietnam post-traumatic stress syndrome or a vulnerable-loner- fights-against-impossible-odds thriller. When he chooses (less pretentiously) the latter, the jettisoned baggage allows him a flashy sprint to the finish line. Evan Scott, an architect out of Groton and Yale who excels at polo and fencing, is standing atop a very wrong edifice one threatening Manhattan night when he sees a young woman fall from an unfinished Madison Avenue skyscraper across the street. Not too many days pass before be learns that: a) she didn't fall but was pushed; and b) his bruited presence has become a threat to those behind the pushing. Suddenly additional people are dropping dead, including coworker/lover, Sanchia Fuentes. Frustratingly, no one in whom Scott confides believes the accumulating mishaps are anything more than coincidental. The skeptics include Scott's wife, Catherine (herself privileged and quite an upper-class bigot); his bosses, who suggest an immediate vacation; and the police, who think Scott's cries of wolf may be a cover-up for homicidal tendencies. Those who know Scott is speaking the truth are the three Hindu brothers who lend their name to Rao Electric, the firm doing the wiring for ill-fated 366 Madison. (They've been monkeying around on their highly recompensed job, though neither Evan nor the reader gets the details till the very end.) Only an aging newsstand owner named Ram Dass Lal takes Scott's side and, indeed, insists on helping bell the meanies in their lairs. Having found in the Raos a fresh twist on developers-as-'90s-villains, Smith gets the action moving from New York City to New Jersey to Maine with guns blazing, knives flashing, elevators soaring, guts spilling, blood spurting. On balance, good Karma. (Literary Guild selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93773-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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
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