An overcooked revenge fantasy from a sometime (some other time) master of the genre (Summer of Fear, 1993, etc.). When intern Rebecca Harris was shot down in mistake for her boss, Orange County Journal columnist Susan Baum, she left two inconsolable mourners behind: her fiance, FBI agent Joshua Weinstein, and her secret lover, Journal reporter John Menden. Six months later, Menden's retired to a small-town paper and a dilapidated trailer, but Weinstein hasn't wasted his time: He's satisfied himself that Rebecca was killed by Vann Holt, a Feebee-turned-private-security-king, who was out for revenge against Baum's public defense of the man who killed Holt's own son and left his wife paralyzed. Weinstein, who doesn't have enough on Holt to put him away, wants Menden to meetcute with the target, worm his way into Liberty Ridge, the Holt compound, and get the goods on him. So Menden, via an elaborate FBI-scripted scenario, saves Holt's eligible daughter Valerie from a fate worse than death, runs the gauntlet of suspicious underlings at Liberty Ridge, and finds things getting entirely too cozy. Carolyn Holt is convinced he's her dead son; Valerie is coming on to him like a house afire; and soon Meriden is ablaze, too. Meantime, Holt's thuggish assistant Lane Fargo is upping his surveillance on the interloper, and the FBI is warned that they have only six more days to close the case before they're pulled off. Does any of this sound familiar? All right, the original stroke here—the tear-soaked alliance between Weinstein and Menden—is handled with all the intensity you'd expect from Parker; but it isn't enough to justify the ill-advised presumption, signaled by gallons of pressure on our man Menden, that we don't all know exactly where this is all headed. Well-turned-out, if you can ignore the striking lack of originality. But it does seem unwise to pit such familiar fare against summer reruns on TV.
Pub Date: July 4, 1996
ISBN: 0-7868-6142-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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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