A debut effort that’s ambitious in scope but often limited by its unsteady execution.
In Janson’s (The Child in Our Hearts, 2012, etc.) first mystery, a pediatrician sued for malpractice finds himself at the epicenter of a far-reaching conspiracy.
Eastern Kentucky native Joe Nelson owes his medicine practice to a fortuitous accident: In his youth, he was a coal miner, and a roof collapse during a routine excavation left him trapped. Thanks to a courageous, quick-thinking doctor, Joe made it out—as an amputee, albeit, but still alive. Years later, he has paid that salvation forward by pursuing a career in pediatrics. All is well until 4-year-old Linda Murphy dies in his care, and the toxicologist’s report reveals an overdose of Lidocaine as the cause of death. Joe’s insistence that he provided the correct dosage pales in the face of a malpractice suit brought on by Linda Murphy’s extremely wealthy, powerful family. With his questionably competent defense attorney, an imminent but strangely amicable divorce from his wife, a blossoming romance and a determination to uncover the true circumstances of Linda’s death, Joe has his hands full. Snooping into medical records and investigating potential profiteers earns him enemies on all sides—the hospital, the courts, even the local police force—and sets into motion a race against time. Regrettably, the mystery at the heart of the novel is bordered by clumsy, often distracting syntax: “The server was there almost immediately as if he had been waiting for them to be ready to order, which he probably had been.” As often as the story hits its stride, it is mired by awkward turns of phrase, repetition—“The grounds were kept and lit well…They arrived at the plaque at the center of a well-lit area”—and bland dialogue. Janson’s experience as a physician shines through in the clinically written sections, particularly the court proceedings and explanations of medical procedures, which are professional, articulate and deftly handled. While the grand reveal satisfactorily ties numerous loose ends together, it’s diluted by its predictability; astute readers will likely guess (or at least suspect) the criminal mastermind a quarter of the way into the book.
A debut effort that’s ambitious in scope but often limited by its unsteady execution.Pub Date: March 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0988515727
Page Count: 238
Publisher: SDP Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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