Ruiz, a practicing California DA, creates a warts-and-all protagonist for his third outing (Giuseppe Rocco, 1998, etc.): you...
A notably different courtroom drama in which a young Mexican-American battles overwhelming odds to become a lawyer, then a good lawyer, and finally—sadly enough—a successful one.
Gabriel Garcia hated the San Joaquin Valley grape farm where he was born and raised, hated everything about it, including the fact of his Mexican-American heritage, which he construed to mean he was second-rate. First-rate was white: rich, powerful, and privileged. Gabby’s abiding fear was that he might get trapped, sucked into a vortex of demoralizing poverty and despair, and he vowed resistance. Driving himself relentlessly, he finished college and law school—taking eleven years to do it—and spent the next five building a practice, his clients drawn exclusively from the hardscrabble villages around San Jose. And now, though he works far too much—routinely twelve hours a day, six days a week—he feels good about himself. He’s helping people, his people, and becoming proficient at it. Suddenly, however, life takes an unexpected turn. He falls in love with Rebecca Williams, a beautiful, upper-class white woman, and, to his enormous surprise, she reciprocates. They marry, but it doesn’t go well—Gabby’s insecurities and unwarranted jealousy at fault. For him, separation results in corroding anger, and its effect is to shift the thrust of his ambition from selfless to selfish. He takes a case he knows he shouldn’t, a white man’s case, and he takes it because he yearns for a success that will somehow punish Rebecca. It’s a high-profile affair: a prominent doctor is accused of murdering his wife. As Gabby fights it he also fights himself, suffering immeasurably throughout, and in the process learns bitter lessons only peripherally connected with the verdict.
Ruiz, a practicing California DA, creates a warts-and-all protagonist for his third outing (Giuseppe Rocco, 1998, etc.): you may not always like Gabby, but you'll probably find yourself rooting for him.Pub Date: March 31, 2003
ISBN: 1-55885-393-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arte Público
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
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 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
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