Just like a witty friend telling a story; quirky, good-natured and never boring.
Author Ross returns to 1940s New York (Tales from the Sidewalks of New York, 2012, etc.) with a comedy about Mafioso types and a rather muddled attempt to whack someone.
At the Mermaid Social Athletic Club, mob boss Dwarf and his men meet for their poker games. It’s also where Sonny LoCicero and company must contend with the likes of Louie the Louse, who earned his nickname by claiming some of the Dwarf’s business under the guise of an employee. The Dwarf has a reason for permitting Louie’s misdeeds, but on learning he’s been duped, he wants retaliation—and what better way than to enlist the loathsome Fivel Finnegan, who’s always up for an easy way to make money? One of the most salient traits of Ross’ novel is the narrator, Sonny. Sonny rarely plays an active role in the story, sometimes relaying events secondhand, a funny narrative strategy. His phonetic narration makes all the characters’ dialogue sound the same, using words like “yerself” and disregarding the final letter of -ing words; he admits to conjecture, such as guessing the weather conditions during an encounter between Fivel and Louie on Coney Island; and he’s disposed to going off on tangents but gets himself back on track with an “anyhow.” Sonny reveals little about himself, including any personality, but he’s surrounded by a motley bunch of uproarious characters—Minnie, who sells two-day-old newspapers and whose cataracts require her taxicab passengers to feed her directions; Fats Suozzo, who thinks the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre was the holiday’s namesake; and Joey the Clown, who debates inviting his current wife to his wedding. Ross gives many characters recognizable qualities: The Dwarf towers over everyone; Louie always wears a red plaid vest; and Fivel has a refrain of “Five’ll getcha ten” for his unending challenges. A few jokes are predictable—a dog named Spot, a woman telling a roomful of men that she’s a thespian—but they’re eclipsed by the other funny stuff.
Just like a witty friend telling a story; quirky, good-natured and never boring.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615833156
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Bedell Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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