A State Department staffer eager to save her faltering post realizes almost too late that she's sold her soul to a cabal of careerist D.C. demons. As a junior death officer in State's Citizens Emergency Center, Kate Verdi has the job of notifying relatives and expediting arrangements for Americans who die abroad. When she's assigned to collect the body of Patricia Van Slyke, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State killed in her Beijing hotel room shower, only to find that the body has been cremated without authorization from the family, Verdi, who's recently been given the gate by her married lover, now sees her career going up in flames as well. The only way to save it, her old buddy Lorna Demeritte advises her, is to join the Circle, a group of State Department types who watch out for ways to further one another's careers. Kimball, making his hardcover debut after two paperbacks, adroitly evokes Verdi's queasiness about the Circle, which has just squeezed one of its members into Van Slyke's newly vacant position and is angling to get another member onto the Russia desk, a slot opened up by the assassination of State attorney Brian Porter. But once Lorna blurts out the news that the Circle's having her stalked and that Verdi had better get out while she can, the Circle shifts from a highly effective substitute for John Grisham's tentacular law firm—after all, who better to evoke paranoia than your federal government at work?— to a bunch of paunchy commandos who end up getting rousingly but not very plausibly outfoxed by Verdi and Sgt. Clarence Witherspoon, the D.C. cop investigating Brian Porter's murder. Verdi's unsuspected talent with handguns puts the story in the fantasy column for good. As long as they're rooted in everyday matters, Verdi's fears are gripping stuff. It's only when the devils come out into the open that Kimball loses his grip.
Pub Date: Dec. 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-94230-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
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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