by Ron Robinson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2000
An old-fashioned noir novel that could have come out of the period it so carefully evokes.
On New Year’s Eve 1936, the powder house in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, blew up, killing one person and turning a second victim into a circus freak. Robinson’s second novel embroiders a fictional explanation how it all happened.
Who would set the match to a structure housing over seven thousand pounds of explosives? For answer, Robinson (Thunder Dreamer, 1996) goes back to that old, old story, the criminal who couldn’t quit the life. In the months leading up to the disaster, he shows safecracker Raymond (“Preacher”) Hardokker pulled back into stealing. First, his reluctant friendship with naïve fellow con Paul Haroldson leads him to break into the local A&P’s new Toledo safe as if the best way to mentor Paul were to indulge his get-rich-quick fantasies. Then, after the heist has forced him to go on the lam and soured his romance with Francine, the waitress he’s gotten pregnant, for keeps, he has the bad luck to meet his own mentor, Yankee Tom Bowdin. The meeting is no accident, he soon realizes; it’s been set up—and so has Preacher—by Tom’s current companions, Lou Fine and Bruno Bellini. As the prospective brains and artillery of a foolproof jewel robbery they’ve got lined up back in Sioux City, they know that Tom, once at the head of his profession, has lost his edge to morphine, and they use him to inveigle his former understudy into their gang. Even though he can see every move coming, Preacher can’t outmaneuver Tom’s deadly companions, and eventually he’s sweating bullets in front of Isadore Weinberg’s cannonball safe, with still worse developments around the corner. A frame tale subtly suggests that Preacher may not have the last word on the truth.
An old-fashioned noir novel that could have come out of the period it so carefully evokes.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-944287-24-7
Page Count: 262
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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by Ron Robinson
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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