A very well-done if bleak and cynical chiller from an old pro (The Flames of Heaven, 1993, etc.) in which Army counterintelligence operatives battle hit men from an erstwhile Soviet republic. Purposely kneecapped by a local warlord's top gun during a goodwill trip to a Baltic backwater, Major Christopher Ritter is nearly through rehab when he learns from Colonel Jeb Bates that Charlene Whyte, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Humanitarian Affairs, wants him as an aide. The widowed Ritter (who still mourns his wife, a cancer victim) meets with Whyte in the Pentagon, but refuses assignment to her staff on several counts: He and Whyte had been lovers in college, and in the interim she's become a virulently anti-military dragon lady of the left. After their meeting, however, while Whyte and Ritter are standing in a hallway, an ex-KGB general blows her office and himself to kingdom come, dragging the good soldier into a twisty high-stakes game of the sort he despises. Unbeknownst to Ritter and Bates (who's now a player), Whyte has her own agenda. The dead Russian general had planned to sell her evidence that Korean War POWs were executed by the Soviets; in turn, Whyte was to deliver these proofs to Senator Oliver Cromwell, her political patron and a lackey of commercial interests that want to destroy pictures that could cost them petroleum business in the former USSR. Ritter winds up babysitting the late general's daughter, Nadya Morozova, a dishy psychopath with whom he becomes sexually involved. She, too, though, has considerable personal ambitious, and slips away from the broody Ritter. The whole ugly mess is resolved in a violent, ironic confrontation on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where Ritter comes face to face with the Eurasian assassin who crippled him. An elegantly written, engrossing, wintry tale, notable for its conviction that East/West clashes did not end with the Cold War.
Pub Date: Aug. 8, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-86583-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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