A bracingly intelligent work, though ultimately a prisoner of the genre’s conventions.
A savvy, fast-paced second novel about an economist’s midlife crisis.
Vincenzo D’Orsi is a senior economist with the World Bank in Washington, D.C. The 54-year-old Italian has responsibility for Latin America. In 2005, the radical Evo Morales is a shoo-in to win the presidency of Bolivia, and only Vincenzo has the authority to change bank policy toward that country. The U.S. representative at the bank tries to bully him into an aid cutoff. Not only does Vincenzo resist, he goes public, giving an interview to his old friend Walter, veteran Washington Post reporter. It is a pivotal moment; the move ends his long career at the bank, yet Vincenzo is unsure why he has acted so drastically; he still admires the bank, for all its defects. Mountford manages all this very well: The economics are delivered crisply, and Vincenzo’s impulsive exit rings true. The format for the midlife-crisis novel calls for professional and personal self-destruction, and on the personal level, Mountford is less sure-footed, as was also apparent in his 2011 debut (A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism). There can be no blowup with his wife, for Vincenzo is a widower. His beloved Cristina was killed in a traffic accident some two years earlier, so it’s his relationship with their grown daughter, Leonora, that must speed his self-destruction. He loves her dearly but loathes her boyfriend, which causes his not-entirely-convincing break with her. One welcome tweak to the format comes with Ben, a young black man, who Vincenzo believes is a CIA operative, who shows up out of the blue to threaten Vincenzo if he exacerbates U.S. relations with Latin America; the Italian has no green card and could be deported. But the die has been cast; at the invitation of Morales, Vincenzo travels to Bolivia (the setting for Mountford’s debut) with Walter. His required meltdown occurs when he delivers a boozy speech to a large audience in La Paz.
A bracingly intelligent work, though ultimately a prisoner of the genre’s conventions.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-935639-72-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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