A slow-burning thriller that reveals the seedy politics of higher learning in America.
Cover (Danced by the Light of the Moon, 2013) offers a thriller about a college professor whose career and life are threatened when he learns about his university’s acceptance of shady donations.
Thomas Simpson is an associate professor of communications at Sessions University, where his best friend, Zoltan Vastag, is a senior cancer researcher. One night at the university’s faculty club they encounter Frank Lusby, the chief consultant of university president Bryan Q. Fitz-Hugh’s Campaign for Progress. He asks Thomas, “If you had one word of advice for the president, what would it be?” Thomas suggests that Fitz-Hugh should use podcasts and printed think pieces to inform his constituency about the campaign, which aims, among other goals, to make Sessions energy self-sufficient within five years. Lusby then invites Thomas and Zoltan to a campus reception, where they meet free-spirited billionaire Mark Berger, who’s on Sessions’ board of trustees. Berger quickly takes a liking to Thomas, and Lusby later suggests Thomas parlay the relationship into a donation to the campaign. Fitz-Hugh has already secured millions for the Beijing Center, which is integral to placing Sessions on the global stage. But when Thomas eventually learns the reality behind Fitz-Hugh's campaign, he’s already in too deep, thanks in part to the seductive Ursula Mueller, who works at the university. In this novel, Cover effectively portrays the struggle of many American professionals trying to balance life at work and at home. To that end, Thomas’ family members are well-developed: 15-year-old daughter Sarah is brilliant but bored in high school; his younger son, Tommie, has a developmental disorder that he and his psychologist wife, Janet, are reluctant to label. Cover also interestingly parallels Tommie’s obsession with loud, shiny firetrucks and Thomas’ entanglements in Fitz-Hugh’s machinations. Thomas isn’t a very sympathetic narrator, though, as he easily glides into an affair with Ursula and smugly describes his wife on the couch as reading “the latest deep and meaningful historical novel selected by her book club.” Overall, however, the narrative’s modest pace and eerie plausibility succeed.
A slow-burning thriller that reveals the seedy politics of higher learning in America.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-944037-68-0
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Epigraph Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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