A nice portrait of life on the make, with a genuine, gritty feel and some memorable characters, but Lyons (Going for Broke,...
Sprawling account of a small-time gambler who hustles his way through the long, hot summer of 1988.
Like all gamblers, Hawk thinks he can beat the odds and refuses to learn when experience teaches otherwise. Now more than ten grand in debt to loan shark Armand, Hawk still thinks he can clear the books when his number comes in. He’s had big ambitions ever since he met Sammy, an old-school New York hustler who showed him one election year how he could make more money hawking campaign buttons in a day that he made as a pizza boy in a whole week. That was during the Nixon administration, and now Hawk is heading down to Atlanta for the convention that’s going to nominate Michael Dukakis. He’s under the gun, all right: Armand’s goon, Mr. Skinhead, has already cut off one of Hawk’s toes, with a promise of more to come if he misses his next payment. But there’s positive encouragement too, in the form of his new girlfriend Carla, a nubile neon-sign artist with a quick wit and a little girl from her old marriage. Hawk is still deep in the red after Atlanta, so he looks to the Republican convention in New Orleans to make up the difference. Meanwhile, Carla’s sleazy ex-husband Nelson has found out about her affair with Hawk and has begun stalking her. And Hawk’s old mentor Sammy is in the hospital for heart surgery. So Hawk has plenty of worries beside his own. After the convention, all the loose ends of Hawk’s life come back together in New York, where a gangland battle in one stroke solves most of his problems—but not all.
A nice portrait of life on the make, with a genuine, gritty feel and some memorable characters, but Lyons (Going for Broke, 1991, etc.) tries to put in a bit too much 1980s history, and the story rambles more than it needs to.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-59228-409-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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
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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