A relentless, clock-stopping psychothriller about a neurotic Ukrainian figure-skating champion trying to make it in Hollywood, her marginally psychotic bodyguard, and the insidious stalker who guards a secret that could shatter her career. Quirky, unpredictable Yelena —Ellen— Cusak gave up skating when her father died. Now, at 25, with a failed marriage behind her, she’s developed the reputation of a sacred monster. Her sleazy handler, Lenny Mayot, has big-money dreams for his beautiful Olympic star, most of which fade because she refuses to kowtow to Hollywood gatekeepers. Ellen is almost broke, reduced to giving lessons to the skating daughters of well-heeled parents, when a woman’s corpse—a victim of a slasher murder—is discovered on her property. Add to this a stalker, the third to pester her so far. But, unlike his predecessors, the —Ice Man— can slip into and out of Ellen’s house, and knows intimate details about her life. As she totters on the edge of a breakdown, Lenny hires Pete Golding, a former cop turned gung-ho ’security consultant,— whose zeal at protecting the rich and famous frequently explodes into tough-guy violence. Despite the inevitable spark of romantic heat that ensues, Golding gets no help from Ellen, who refuses to explain whatever it is the stalker appears to know about her. Golding identifies the stalker as —Bob,— an Internet oddball whose Ellen-worshiping drivel indicates a prior relationship with the skater, as well as a weirdly sincere desire to help her professionally. Then Golding tracks Bob—and the corpse—to a fertility clinic Ellen visited long ago, when she and her husband wanted a child. Meantime, Bob wires Ellen’s house with explosives he hopes will persuade her to be his forever, dead or alive. A formula plot, been-there-done-that characters, and the tired, hothouse settings of L.A. noir should not add up to a breathless, gory, thoroughly enjoyable exercise in genre suspense. Yet Lynch (The Policy, 1998, etc.) delivers this, and more, with almost effortless ease.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-525-94510-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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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