A shrewdly written and intellectually arousing tale.
An American diplomat in Tanzania during the Cold War confronts her moral reservations about big-game poaching in this historical novel.
Diana Forrest returns to diplomatic work after an extended hiatus. She left her previous post to marry a “hot shot foreign correspondent,” but the relationship ultimately failed. She accepts a new job as a foreign service officer at the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania, which, during this era, amounts to engaging in a battle with Soviet operatives to disseminate successful political narratives among the locals. But her attention is also gripped by the feral world of safaris and of a savanna full of volatile predators—it’s a world that both terrifies and excites her and one that novelist Sharpe (Undertow, 2014, etc.) stirringly depicts. Andrew, her subordinate at work, is a veteran tour guide and gives Diana her first experience with the Tanzanian wild. But he’s also an enthusiastic hunter, and she wrestles with her misgivings about the recreational slaughter of animals. At one point, she reports her moral dilemma to a friend when Andrew asks her to drive on one of his expeditions: “I don’t know what to do. My conscience resists. Yet, driving or not, I’ll be eating the bush meat, so what’s the difference?” It turns out that big-game poaching, especially for ivory to be sold on the black market, is ubiquitous, and she suspects that Andrew may be involved in a smuggling operation. The situation becomes even more complicated as a romantic relationship flowers between them. Sharpe deftly braids together two interlocking storylines that deal, respectively, with the ungovernable Tanzanian bush and the tangled world of political bureaucracy. The author writes from a deep reserve of personal experience—like the book’s protagonist, she was an foreign service officer in Tanzania—and that knowledge endows the narrative with a sense of authenticity. The diplomatic storyline provides readers with an engrossing look into the world of strategic misinformation; for example, the Soviets are said to have once spread propaganda that the AIDS virus was created in a laboratory in Maryland. Also, Sharpe’s buoyant, cheeky prose memorably captures Diana’s illicit relationship with Andrew, who’s not only a colleague, but a married man: “We managed like lovers in a French farce, exercising extreme vigilance to avoid comical hallway encounters with people we knew—the complication being that, between us, we knew most every one at the conference.” Diana is revealed as an intriguing mix of contradictions—a savvy political operative who’s also romantic and who’s fiercely independent but achingly lonely. Diana is also clearly taken by Andrew; at one point, she fretfully wonders if she’s “become a Cold-War propagandist in bed with petty poachers.” The story’s most tantalizing element is its moral aspect, as it interrogates the defensibility of hunting amoral beasts with great nuance without a hint of dogmatic proselytizing. Overall, this is a thoughtful, provocative tale that, in the spirit of Iris Murdoch’s work, raises urgent questions while also resisting facile answers.
A shrewdly written and intellectually arousing tale.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63293-239-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Sunstone Press
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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