First novel about an attempt by British Intelligence to bring down Colombian druglord Pablo Envigado by placing an agent among the upper-level ranks of the Medell°n cartel—an attempt that's tragically undermined by unwitting cross-plotting among Envigado's enemies. When romantic, guilt-ridden superspook David Jardine, whose platonic marriage is punctuated by intense, irregular adulteries, is ordered to choose a new agent to infiltrate Envigado's upstart drug ring, he prepares a list of candidates, then whittles it down to two: Scottish-Argentinean barrister Malcolm Strong and Special Forces Capt. Harry Ford—and finally, after chapters and chapters of training and indecision, decides to send Harry, at just about the same time he starts sleeping with Harry's wife Elizabeth. Meantime, in New York, Homicide Lt. Eddie Lucco finds his attempt to identify a teenage girl killed by bad drugs stymied by an unusually high mortality rate among possible informants who could explain her connection to Medell°n hanger-on Ricardo Santos. And in Dublin, rising judge Eugene Pearson, all but promised the Attorney General's slot after the next election, is blackmailed by Envigado strongman Luis Restrepo into laying an ongoing cocaine trail into Europe in return for a regular commission that Pearson's fellow-IRA higher-ups are desperate to get their hands on. It's obvious that Pearson's wayward daughter Siobhan is Lucco's Jane Doe, but Smith takes his sweet time stringing the three plots together, feverishly introducing supporting characters and spinning out subplots as Lucco warily agrees to become the DEA's inside man, and Pearson sets himself against his chums in the IRA, and Jardine finds himself falling hard for Elizabeth, and Harry, finally nestled securely in Envigado's bosom, realizes he liked taking $2 million for saving his boss's life by killing a former colleague. British TV writer Smith's debut is immensely promising in individual scenes and episodes—especially in Lucco's gripping, believably heroic story—but overslung, overinsistent, and finally anticlimactic in its so-what holocaust.
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-78464-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
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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