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LAST CHANCE FOR GLORY

Solomita (A Good Day to Die, not reviewed) depicts a New York City where the bad guys are tough, but the good guys are tougher...and make better wisecracks. A woman is found murdered in the back seat of a Mercedes Benz in Gramercy Park. A confession is easily extracted from Billy Sowell, a docile, retarded vagrant. The case is closed, and Billy is incarcerated. Two years later, private investigator Marty Blake sips a Moussy at a bar in northern Queens, hoping to get some answers from Bela Kosinski, a cop who had worked on the murder case and is now spending a besotted retirement swilling vodka. Marty has been hired by a criminal lawyer renowned for his shifting wig and ability to get off the most unrepentant rapists and murderers to gather evidence for his newest challenge: to win the appeal of a wrongly imprisoned man. Marty's ease on the information superhighway and Bela's knack for grilling witnesses make them a good team that quickly discovers Billy was framed. Before they can secure his release, Billy is silenced forever by Tommy Brannigan, Bela's former partner. Unwilling to give up the first real mission of their lives, Marty and Bela set out to find the killer's identity, unraveling a conspiracy by the Manhattan borough president, a Supreme Court justice, and the top-secret Intelligence Division of the New York City Police Department, whose spies follow them and bug their homes before resorting to more mortal measures. As the danger increases, their torpid lives are raised to loftier heights, but there is precious little time to prove themselves heroes. The evolution of Marty and Bela's partnership and the meaning it gives to their lives are as touching as any story of romantic love, and when a sober Bela blushes over his new-found ambition, it'll break your heart. Witty, sincere, boorishly sentimental.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994

ISBN: 1-883402-27-1

Page Count: 314

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994

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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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