Washington thriller with a psychic spin, pitting a wishy-washy White House aide against a telekinetic sociopath, a superstitious vice president, a witchy spirit medium, and the ghost of a murdered novelist. The plot of this latest tale from horror/suspenser Hynd (Cemetery of Angels, 1995, etc.) is so burdened with psychic silliness it could almost play as an X-Files novelization. William Cochrane, an underachieving, 40-year-old vice-presidential aide, returns from his father's funeral to find himself summoned to his boss's Georgetown house. George Farley, the fatuously Reaganesque President, is suffering from inexplicable losses of consciousness, and Vice President Gabriel Lang is troubled that an old curse placed on him might affect his likely move into the White House. It seems that Lang, who is wont to explain executive policy in terms of astrological arcana, can't sit down to a card game without being dealt a Queen of Hearts and a Queen of Diamonds, no matter how the deck is shuffled or who deals. Lang interprets this as a sign that he's doomed, then sends Cochrane to visit an old witch who hints that dark occult forces are involved. Meanwhile, a young couple are spooked by poltergeist phenomena as they renovate the basement of their quaintly historic Massachusetts home; a demented math teacher discovers he can snuff candles with his brain; a sexpot TV reporter stumbles on the story that will make her career; and the disembodied voice of an unpublished novelist breaks into the narrative with creepy italicized soliloquies about how, if not for the nasty doings of several villains, she could have been a contender. It isn't long before Cochrane, who is no Prince Hamlet, is nevertheless seeing his father's ghost while developing his own psychic talents to help the dead novelist get vengeance. A quick, choppy, thoroughly preposterous read that forces campy, direct-to-video B-movie horror clichÇs into a blandly paranoid landscape of Washington intrigue.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-57566-127-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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