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with his brain; a sexpot TV reporter stumbles on the story that will make her career; and the disembodied voice of an unpublished novelist breaks into the narrative with creepy italicized soliloquies about how, if not for the nasty doings of several villains, she could have been a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
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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