The death of aggressively self-made entrepreneur Sam Yones's much-loved older son Matt, who'd been his father's gofer for years, is followed by a grand jury investigation of Sam's sharp investment practices—in this big, unfocused, breast-beating orgy from the author of Something in Common (1985). Ambitious Miami US Attorney Spencer Pelchek's investigation, focusing on Sam's Cayman Islands tax-dodge accounts, actually threatens much more, since the ownership and trusteeship of those accounts drags in not only Sam's longtime partners Mike Ankers and Gordy Wiser but his dull, doggedly faithful older son Billy, his shiksa wife Liz, whose first loyalty is really to Mike—she'd loved him years before but finally settled for Sam—and Mike's sharp live-in Cheryl Stone, who could be pressured to testify against him because they're not married (and who therefore has to be brought under Sam's watchful eye to push papers as a consultant). As Spencer and his even more predatory boss, Byron Varner, close in for the kill—putting Mike up on the stand to testify, asking him probing questions about his knowledge of the Cayman accounts and then allowing him to wriggle off the hook, offering him immunity in return for dishing the dirt on Sam—and as the revelations begin to thicken—Cheryl finds out that Sam has sent Billy to the Caymans to backdate a $1.8 million deposit in an account listed to Mike, and the law informs Sam that Matt's death in a car crash was actually a hit meant for him—the characters, except for sweating, honorable Mike, start to recede in a haze of bromides (``You never get to the top floor. No one knows where the top floor is'') until they matter even less than their knee-jerk anxieties (anguish about betraying a 40-year friendship, memories of Passover Seders, shiksa-bashing). As business melodramas go, this overblown opus has the words but not the music. Even the sure-fire courtroom material falls flat.
Pub Date: June 3, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-74425-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
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 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
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