While the prose needs further editing, Ronco puts a novel spin on lost love.
A high-stakes tale of boy-meets-girl, etc.
Jack Gage was a handsome, down-on-his-luck kid, born in prison to a mother taking the fall for his deviant, absent father. When Jack was 12, his mother died, leaving him to live with an aunt and uncle in a small seaside town. Shortly after, he meets her, the prettiest girl in school and the one who would steal his heart forever: Patti Cain. When they were both 18, Patti and Jack shared a single kiss, followed by a proclamation: While he’ll always be the one she wants, stability and money come before love. The two went off to separate colleges. Jack became a great golf player and Patti, a millionaire’s wife. Now, 20 years later, Jack is professional gambler, wielding poker and golf as his weapons of choice and nursing a fading hope of ever seeing Patti again. Then, Jack’s old high school nemesis, Van Taylor, appears and makes Jack an offer: help Van hijack business from one of the richest men in Florida—Patti Cain’s husband. Though the odds are stacked against him, Jack will risk it all to see his true love again. Ronco (Elevator Symphonies, 1999) endeavors to combine the finesse of golf and high-stakes intrigue of poker into a story of inaccessible love. While readers may be able to forgive the proliferation of exclamation marks, they might become a bit frustrated with the considerable amount of explication, as well as the play-by-play of every golf hole and poker hand, which renders the plot a bit static. Despite this, Ronco provides a twisty, unpredictable plot, with Jack Gage proving to be a fairly reliable narrator exhibiting devious but understandable intentions.
While the prose needs further editing, Ronco puts a novel spin on lost love.Pub Date: July 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463611903
Page Count: 254
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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