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DAMAGED GOODS

Solomita, evidently tired of messing around in his last two thrillers with substitutes for battle-scarred Stanley Moodrow (A Piece of the Action, 1992, etc.), ex-cop turned p.i., returns to what he does most—in this volcanic, lumbering mano a mano a mano. Moodrow's prey this time, a crazy killer named Jilly Sappone, would still be in jail if the New York parole board hadn't mysteriously voted to reverse its denial of his appeal. Out on the streets, Jilly's hooked up with his old cellmate Jackson-Davis Wescott, a kindly, retarded rapist who wouldn't hurt a soul—except for all those women—and gone after the ex- wife who turned him in. By the time Moodrow's called to the scene, Ann Kalkadonis is already in the hospital; Jilly has snatched her four-year-old daughter, Theresa-Marie; a battered- women's group has retained computer specialist Ginny Gadd to investigate; and Moodrow, feeling every inch a dinosaur, has to play second fiddle to a female op young enough to be his daughter. His obvious cue, once Gadd's database searches have uncovered a lead, is to track Jilly through his cousin Carlo, a fuddled dealer who's his own best customer. But when Moodrow and Gadd bully Carlo into telling what he knows and speed off to ground zero, Jilly, prone to epileptic rages, provokes a violent stalemate that sends Moodrow back to the drawing board—and the question of who put a spoke in the wheels of justice by pressuring the parole board to turn Jilly loose. At this point Solomita (Last Chance for Glory, 1994, etc.) turns from his usual focus on white-hot action to marking an edgy, shapeless waiting game involving Moodrow, the NYPD, a pair of FBI sharpies, Jilly's canny Aunt Josie, and Jilly himself. Solomita ladles on the double-crosses, the casual killings, the sexual perversions—but despite the constant threats of mayhem and S&M, his monstrous circus bogs down in one chargeable felony after another.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-688-81584-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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