An ambitious but flawed anti-thriller pitting a thoughtful cop against an alleged terrorist in big-sky Montana. Even before he came to Rozette, Henry Skelton had made a name for himself by doing time for assaulting an FBI agent in San Francisco. Now he's the only suspect in the bombing of a helicopter—a bombing that even he acknowledges he witnessed without seeing any other survivors on the scene. And since long- shot senatorial candidate Merle Puhl's expecting a campaign visit from the former US president, the Secret Service is doing its best, not very successfully, to keep a close eye on Skelton. But Ray Bartell, the local cop assigned as liaison for the Service's ``lunacy patrol,'' finds Skelton a little too ripe a provocateur to believe. He's impressed by his preservationist wife Helen's assessment of Skelton's longtime companion, nurse Gina Lozano, and by the withering denials Skelton issues on the rare occasions when Bartell gets close enough to talk to him. When he's not puzzling over his father—a grizzled cowboy who's suddenly planning his film debut in Busted Heart, the latest flick starring actor-rancher Brandon McWilliams—Bartell puzzles over the Puhl campaign, which seems to have room for a lot more dirty tricks than a barrel of monkeys, or a single sincere survivalist. Meanwhile, Reid (The Red Corvette, 1992) underplays the mandatory interrogations, gunfights, and car chases to focus on the deepening relationship between the decent cop and an antagonist maddened by all the things that drive Bartell himself crazy. But this double portrait isn't well served by the apparatus of the suspense novel, no matter how persistently Bartell keeps disavowing his role as the heroic dispenser of justice. A well-meaning mess, with a story that sputters and fizzles and a pair of salt-and-pepper heroes never quite as compelling as they're meant to be.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-7867-0257-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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