Jettisoning the increasingly feeble mysteries that have been the weakest part of his recent thrillers (Stranger in Paradise,...
Everett Hitch and Virgil Cole ride (separately) into the western town of Resolution and deal with the trouble that instantly springs up to greet them.
Amos Wolfson, who owns the Blackfoot Saloon, has already lost several bouncers, one to a smartly placed bullet, when he offers the job to Everett Hitch. Hitch’s approach to the position doesn’t sound very ambitious. He sits night after night in the saloon with a shotgun, waiting to see what develops, and passing the time by adopting such a protective attitude toward local members of the oldest profession that Wolfson sneeringly calls him “Fucking Saint Everett of the Whores.” For all of Hitch’s sentimentality, his tactics are highly effective against Koy Wickman, the weaselly provocateur who works for copper-mine owner Eamon O’Malley. In no time at all Wickman’s been retired, buried and replaced by the fearsome twosome of Cato Tillson and Frank Rose. When Virgil Cole arrives and decides to throw in with his old friend (Appaloosa, 2005) once more, the stage seems set for a showdown between the two legendary pairs of gunslingers as they eye each other from the saloons they’ve signed on to keep orderly. But Parker, in a pleasing twist, allows all four to sidestep the turf war between Wolfson and O’Malley for the land and limited wealth of Resolution, and to join forces against Wolfson’s company store, which has been squeezing them dry. Cole calmly predicts that Wolfson will dismiss his inconveniently activist gunslingers only after he’s found replacements prepared to stand against them, and that’s exactly what happens.
Jettisoning the increasingly feeble mysteries that have been the weakest part of his recent thrillers (Stranger in Paradise, 2008, etc.), Parker focuses on what he does best—ritualistically clipped dialogue and manly posturing—and serves up a reminder of just how much hardboiled fiction owes the Western.Pub Date: June 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15504-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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
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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