A rather stale continuation of the engaging love story introduced in Domovitch’s previous novel.
Domovitch’s sequel to Scorpio Rising (2011) continues the love story of Alex and Brigitte, this time in America.
When Alex Ivanov returns to New York from Paris with his new bride, Brigitte, and her young son, David, his ambition and lust for power threaten their happiness. Once a penniless aspiring architect whose job fell victim to the scheming of a fellow employee, Alex begins to find success in real estate development; through his ruthlessness and daring, he soon becomes a wealthy, powerful developer. Realizing that her own promising career as a painter is incompatible with Alex’s ambition to break into high society, Brigitte gives up art and devotes herself to helping her husband, despite his growing aloofness. As the years pass, Alex begins grooming David to become his successor, without consideration for David’s own artistic inclinations and disregard for material wealth. In denial of Alex’s prolific, indiscreet philandering, Brigitte continues to efface herself in service to her husband—to both her and her son’s detriment. Though Alex achieves success beyond most people’s wildest dreams, it never seems to be enough; he begins to overreach, taking on increasingly risky projects that threaten to bankrupt his company. While Alex deals with a personal tragedy and an increasingly fractured marriage, the company’s precarious position is threatened even further. Alex now stands to lose everything, even his family. Unfortunately, the sequel is weaker than the original title. Alex’s megalomania and Brigitte’s rejection of her own goals are rendered too simplistically to be compelling. David is hardly developed as a character, despite his importance to the plot. Brigitte’s passivity throughout the novel comes as a disappointment; she’s much less dynamic than she was in the first book, so the deterioration of her marriage is less affecting than it could have been. Alex’s seamless rise from poverty to social prominence strains credibility at times, and the depiction of his business dealings is rather unsophisticated. One problem may be that the novel spans more years than its predecessor, whereby few events or emotional developments are explored in enough detail to provide the depth that could save the plot from cliché.
A rather stale continuation of the engaging love story introduced in Domovitch’s previous novel.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-1466242340
Page Count: 328
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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