Jennings is still no threat to Christopher Buckley, and he’s a little too long-winded, but amusing.
The heroes from Jennings’s whimsical 2005 Nam-A-Rama pop up in mid-1970s Mexico, where the president’s life is on the line and the world’s prostitutes have revolution on the brain.
Jack Armstrong is again the straight man in this peppy and cynically cheerful look at what could happen if the whores ran the bordello. Now working for the CIA, Armstrong is the temporary officer in charge of the CIA office at Mexico City’s American embassy, but he’s about to be replaced by Major Crenshaw, a fanatical Catholic who has just arrived in town riding on a burro ready to implement a bizarre personal agenda. Also just arriving is Jack’s relentlessly droll chum Gearhardt, who has at last acquired a first name: “Pepe,” as the many ladies of the evening who populate the great city insist on calling him. Jack is pleased but plenty surprised to see his old chum. Gearhardt was said to have died three years ago, and life’s been lonely without him. Life’s also been simpler. Gearhardt complicates everything and explains nothing. For example, he fails to explain why Marta, the gorgeous and spectacularly endowed Cuban lass he installs in Jack’s apartment, spends her every waking hour in the nude. Or why she has a pistol strapped to her thigh. Nor does he explain believably why it would be a really good idea for Jack to talk a thuggish acquaintance of Marta’s into shooting the president of Mexico at the city’s Cinco de Mayo celebration. The story that finally emerges has to do with a plot to blame Cuba for the assassination, thereby opening the island to legitimate invasion. Well, that’s one explanation. Poor Jack gets dragged all over central Mexico as details emerge. Eventually, he comes to understand that Gearhardt has become the ally of the world’s prostitutes and has in mind a sort of Zionist solution for them.
Jennings is still no threat to Christopher Buckley, and he’s a little too long-winded, but amusing.Pub Date: April 3, 2007
ISBN: 0-765-31661-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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 presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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