An often engaging tale that evokes a universal, old-gang-of-mine sense of nostalgia.
In this debut novel inspired by true events, a former New Orleans police officer recalls his life on the job and his times at a neighborhood bar with his buddies.
In the 1970s and ’80s, David McAllister and his “little band of misfits” hang out at the eponymous bar, located in the Gentilly Terrace area of New Orleans. They include the bartender Barry Christopher, and childhood friends, including the voluptuous Gertie Chauvin, for whom McAllister has an unrequited love; the ingratiating Ron; Greg, who’s usually the butt of his friends’ jokes; beer-bellied and pompadoured Jerry; and a guy known only as “the Satisfier,” who repairs cars. The author weaves vignettes and character sketches set in the Dreux Club with scenes from David’s life on the police force, which have its own cast of “colorful characters”: “We had every kind of cop imaginable. There were big tough ones, skinny geeky ones, old ones, young ones, smart ones, dumb ones, eager ones, and lazy ones. They ran the gamut.” Fenner, who writes that he was “inspired by experiences and memories of my time on the New Orleans Police Department,” clearly amassed a large cache of stories over the course of his career, and he captures the camaraderie that binds David to his friends and fellow officers. This is humorously expressed through the pranks that they play on one another, such as a bang-up gag that David plays on his training officer during a search for an explosive. (This novel’s overall positive portrayal of the police will appeal especially to fellow members of the brotherhood.) Some of the characterization grace notes are quietly moving, as when Barry confesses his difficulty with the concept of God: “I can’t visualize him,” he remarks. “The visual part is important to me.” Other themes are underdeveloped, though, as when David notes, “People close to me told me from time to time that my attitude was changing, that I was becoming cynical….Was it the job changing me? Or was I just becoming more aware of how the world really was?”
An often engaging tale that evokes a universal, old-gang-of-mine sense of nostalgia.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-3788-7
Page Count: 228
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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