Tense and rather lush, expertly working the wonderful setting without overplaying the cultural clash: eerily well suited to...
A straight-arrow young Yorkshireman dives headlong into the corruption of European Shanghai in the 1920s—and very nearly drowns.
China’s rich, rotten plum of a port is the star in this very noir debut by British TV reporter Bradby. The innocent Englishman is Richard Field, son of an obsessively upright but abusive father and a much-higher-class mother with whose very posh relatives Field rather shyly connects upon his arrival in grotesquely divided Shanghai. Field, without a dime but well educated and a fine boxer, has taken a job as a detective in the British police force that keeps the peace in the Imperial sector of Shanghai’s international enclave. He is promptly paired with Detective Caprisi, a tough Chicagoan with a bitter past, and assigned to the investigation of the brutal murder of one of the many Russian demimondaines living in the European underworld. The investigation is hampered immediately by rivalries within the police force and by the early discovery that the victim was the property of Lu, the most powerful Chinese gangster in the city. To complicate further, Natasha, the beautiful but damaged singer in the flat next to the murder victim's, proves irresistible to the handsome and grievously inexperienced young Field. Field’s persistent inquiries into the murder and Lu’s doings stir things up dangerously, as the European community has largely accommodated the gangster to keep things smooth in the business sector, and Field would be a goner were it not for his connection to Uncle Geoffrey Donaldson, a war hero who sits at the top of the thoroughly rotten social heap. There is also protection from the good guys on the police force, but who the good guys are is not at all clear, and becomes even less so as the trail leads to earlier and similar murders of other hapless Russian beauties. Sifting into the social chaos is that most explosive new ingredient, communism.
Tense and rather lush, expertly working the wonderful setting without overplaying the cultural clash: eerily well suited to these parlous times.Pub Date: April 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50397-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
