The galley of Vasile's first novel flashes blurbs (from Jack Anderson, Robert Moss, Adam Hall, Loren D. Estleman, et al.) the way one of the author's fictional mobsters might flash gold chains- -but all the good words don't make this story of betrayal within a mafia family much more than a tidy packet of Cosa Nostra clichÇs. Like his hero, Paul Dante, Vasile is a cop-turned-p.i., and so the crime-color here rings true—though the mafia detail is no sharper than that in most nonfiction mob books; moreover, Vasile has a way of squandering its impact, as when he compresses into only a few flat lines the ancient ceremony by which his villain, Genaro Orsini, becomes a ``made'' man. The author has come up with a nice premise—that 30 years ago, Don Vincent Benedetti, a ``man of honor,'' arranged with J. Edgar Hoover to keep mob crime out of D.C. and to avoid pushing drugs, in exchange for FBI tolerance of nondrug mob activities elsewhere. But now the feds are out to get the aging Benedetti—and their secret weapon is man-of-dishonor Orsini, a sadistic operator whom they're squeezing as an informant: a swift move, since he's about to wed the daughter of Benedetti's brother/underboss, Santo. Meanwhile, Dante, who grew up with Santo, romances a non-Italian dance teacher and tries to make ends meet with his p.i. work and the seedy bar he owns. He smells a rat in Orsini but can't persuade others of his suspicions until after the feds chase Benedetti into hiding, then arrest him, and Orsini tosses a mistress who would blackmail him off a 12-story balcony— an act answered in kind by Benedetti in an airplane flying above the cold Atlantic. The name is Benedetti, not Corleone, but it's still cold Puzo pasta—and Vasile has no new spice to add to the sauce.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-85349-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
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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