A breezy, if flawed, debut that promises better things to come.
A fugitive attorney gets a new lease on life after faking his own death in Fleury’s debut crime novel.
Alton Carver is a bad man who’s just stolen $3 million. He’s the kind of guy who parks his Porsche across two spaces to avoid damage to the paint; now, he’s about to fabricate a fatal boating accident, leaving his wife, Nicole, and 4-year-old daughter, Clara, to pick up the pieces back home in Florida while he spends his days in Costa Rica. The plan is to reveal the truth to his wife a few years down the line. After he pilots his 26-foot Island Runner five miles into the ocean, sets it on fire, and kayaks to safety, he shaves his head, adopts a fake mustache, and returns home to witness his own wake—and then sees a strange man pawing his wife. He won’t leave town until he finds out what’s going on, so he sets about “haunting” his family (by secretly entering the house and making himself coffee, for instance). Meanwhile, the insurance company won’t pay out to Nicole, the police are sniffing around, and little Clara thinks she’s seeing her dead father. When Clara later goes missing, it puts Alton and Nicole on a collision course that will end with someone dead. With first-person narration duties largely split between Alton and Nicole, Fleury’s debut seems pacier than it is, promising an engaging noir story that never fully materializes. Alton’s procrastination, which takes up a fair chunk of the book, reads as a lack of authorial confidence; it also makes the book feel like a novella’s worth of story padded out to novel length. Overall, Fleury’s characters remain frustratingly underdeveloped. Alton’s embezzlement, for example, is merely a contrivance for him to fake his own demise, and his decision to linger is implausible. Nicole, meanwhile, is little more than a barely present mother and cheating wife with a penchant for wine. Luckily, Fleury has a brisk writing style and an ear for characters’ voices. This helps paper over the cracks and ultimately makes the book an enjoyable read.
A breezy, if flawed, debut that promises better things to come.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9991653-0-0
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Erik Spencer Fleury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2017
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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