by Tom Bernard ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2007
Like its reluctantly crooked protagonist, the book gets most of its punch from vice, not virtue.
A bond trader gets into trouble in this cautionary debut thriller.
As the novel opens, Wall Street wunderkind George Wilhelm is on top of the world circa 1993. Following a swift education at the International Monetary Fund, he’s moved into the big leagues at City Trust Bank’s emerging markets desk. He has a sexy girlfriend, an imminent bonus approaching two million dollars and a tawdry Manhattan apartment nicknamed “Club 16B” that he shares with four decadent roommates and their rotating cast of party girls. The arcane details of George’s day job (trading defaulted Central-American debt in the aftermath of NAFTA) convey plenty of verisimilitude but make for taxing reading. Until his short, brutal fall from grace, this is a slow mover. The pace picks up once George’s gambling addiction spirals out of control. He finishes the football season down a large sum of money, and his bookie sells the debt to a pair of outlandish collection specialists: Frank, a brutish fireplug with no sense of humor, and Kevin, a wild-eyed sadist who cribs one-liners and negotiating techniques from Reservoir Dogs. George winds up shambling through midtown Manhattan, popping Percocets to dull the pain of an amputated finger and contemplating the murder of his blackmailers. To save his body, if not his soul, he embarks on a Byzantine act of financial skullduggery, laundering a staggering sum through the Bahamas with the help of a coke-addled accomplice. The similarity between Wall Street’s pressure-cooker intensity and the grisly, albeit comically presented, menace of real racketeering is compellingly drawn. Soon, George is forced to make murderous choices that could ruin him.
Like its reluctantly crooked protagonist, the book gets most of its punch from vice, not virtue.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-06482-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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