Implausibilities, stock types, plodding courtroom drama: a disappointing return.
Habitual overwriting and plot devices that defy credibility ruin the scattered pleasures of this political/courtroom thriller by the usually dependable Bunn (Closing Costs, 1990, etc.).
While researching labor practices in the Guangzho Province of China, Gloria Hall, a student at Georgetown, is arrested. Not only is she beaten, but she’s forced to work in the notorious Factory 101. Bunn writes this, unfortunately, without even acknowledging the possibility that a US citizen might be missed, causing an international incident that would drive CNN wild. Moreover, when Gloria is forced to read a televised statement, the direness of her situation—and she’s obviously under duress—seems to stir only her parents, Austin and Alma Hall, of North Carolina. They hire the near-catatonically depressed attorney Marcus Glenwood, who’s suffering from the guilt and trauma of an auto accident that killed his two children, while his wife and her wealthy family have hired his former colleagues at Knowles, Barbour and Bradshaw to handle the ensuing divorce. But Marcus’s archenemies Logan Kendall, who replaced him, and Suzie Rikkers, whom Marcus once tried to have fired, are the least of his problems. New Horizons, the multinational sports equipment conglomerate that owns Factory 101, is based in North Carolina. The conglomerate, too, hires Logan and the gang to battle the hapless Marcus. On his side are an elderly church deacon, his secretary Netty, and the bad-tempered, contentious Kirsten Stanstead, Gloria’s roommate at Georgetown. In a preposterous scene à la TV-movie, Marcus drops by New Horizons headquarters for the first time; he tries to ask a few questions; they respond, immediately, by trying to kill him, smashing his Blazer with pickup trucks. He doesn’t bother to go to the cops; that, natch, would do no good.
Implausibilities, stock types, plodding courtroom drama: a disappointing return.Pub Date: June 20, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-49615-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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