Lg. Prt. 0-375-70296-2 Patterson, who’s made bestseller lists with legal suspensers like Degree of Guilt (1992) and Silent Witness (1997), is back to his first love, national politics, with this tale of a star-crossed senator’s race for the California primary vote. The move from the courtroom to the campaign trail isn’t such a big one, not only because Patterson’s thrillers have always involved political figures, but because the ordeal of electoral politics—the courteous evasions, the unrelenting back-and-forth with the press, the candidates’ endless triangulation of everything from who they are to which blocs of voters they need to curry’so resembles the stuff of legal intrigue that you can see why so many lawyers run for office. Here, Kerry Kilcannon, a New Jersey senator whose main claims to fame are that his brother, a highly regarded presidential candidate 12 years ago, was gunned down, like Bobby Kennedy, minutes after winning the California primary, and that he is constitutionally incapable—it seems—of telling a lie. Like a more polished version of Warren Beatty’s Bulworth, Kerry has been poking his finger in Vice President Dick Mason’s eye for years, attacking the heir-presumptive’s ties to special interests and in the process staking out common-sense positions on gun control, the death penalty, socialized medicine, and campaign finance. As Kerry comes down the home stretch, though, two bombs are ticking away. A news magazine has gotten hold of a devastating story about his relationship with Lara Costello, a reporter who’s covering the campaign (lots of high-minded speeches on every side of the issues here); and an assassin fresh from a bloodbath at a Boston abortion clinic has come to San Francisco to meet the candidate. Patterson makes as much of the resulting threats as he can, but decent, haunted Kerry never seems to be in half as much trouble as some real politicians are that you can’t help thinking of. The big revelation here is how easy it is to write great speeches when you’re a novelist who doesn’t have to pander to anybody because you’re not running for election. (First printing of 400,000; Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: Aug. 31, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-45042-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
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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