A knowing, reeking, man's-man of a story with a finale right out of Hemingway. Fainthearted readers may want to wait for the...
A retro noir valentine to big-city, small-time boxing.
Al Kelly is a layoff bookie who makes a careful living by taking the action other bookmakers can't handle; his iron rule of never taking a position himself on any of the bets he places protects him equally, he thinks, against big gains or big losses. His caution makes him unique among newcomer Monroe's cast of schemers whose aim is a lot higher than their ethics. Al's sidekick Gene is constantly on him to pick up a piece of his own action. Ex-con fight promoter Robert J. Lipranski ("The Lip") plans to ride his discovery Junior Hamilton all the way to a title bout against Floyd Patterson—as soon as Junior obliges by knocking out local heavyweight contender Tomcat Gordon. Syndicate stalwart Angelo Carpacci already has a big piece of The Lip; Lincoln Johnson, the unofficial mayor of Bronzeville, wants a piece himself in return for setting up the bout. (Imagine what will happen when The Lip's creditors realize they both own the same piece.) And Junior, who's been training like a madman, can hardly wait for the moment when he can let loose against Tomcat, even though he's haunted by the fearsome secret that blackmailer Cleotis Gibson is threatening to reveal. When a combination of bad judgment and betrayal by his fellow bookies puts Al behind the eight-ball, he's ready to join the others in the pressure cooker that Monroe's stylish period piece already has steaming. The only fly in the ointment: a couple of unnecessary murders and a paraplegic cop whose mission of vengeance against syndicate kingpin Sam Giancana makes him entirely too clean-cut for this nest of vipers.
A knowing, reeking, man's-man of a story with a finale right out of Hemingway. Fainthearted readers may want to wait for the film Miramax has under development to sort out the two-dozen subplots.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6730-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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