A worthwhile read despite a simplification that might put some readers off.
Novelist Milton’s (The Godmother, 2018, etc.) political and ideological thriller is “ripped from the headlines” and should come with a trigger warning for Trump followers.
The book starts off with a bang, literally. Elsa Romero and Karl Reinholdt are facing off at a demonstration for immigrants’ rights. Her sign reads “LOVE WILL PREVAIL”; his, “MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN.” A shot rings out, and the gun lands at Karl’s feet. Instinctively he picks it up. But Elsa knows that Karl didn’t fire the fatal shot and tells the police so. Thus begins what may be called “The Salvation of Karl Reinholdt.” Karl fell in with the “alt-right” after the factory that supported the town of Freiburg, Ohio, shut down. He lost his job there, and his parents saw their pensions halved. Enraged and depressed, he was eventually persuaded to blame immigrants. Elsa and her friend and mentor, Sister Solana, are both immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Elsa takes Karl in. They begin to trust one another, and ever so slowly, Elsa deprograms him, so to speak. Let it be said that Milton’s heart is in the right place. We are happy to cheer Elsa and Karl on. But it’s rather clear from the start that Karl will be saved, that he is at heart a decent guy and not a racist. Rather, he is an economically displaced white guy desperate to lay blame for how the traditional life he trusted could have come crashing down this way. In fact, one could argue that Milton has made up too easy a case: Karl isn’t the scary true believer who will eventually blow up a mosque or torch a black church. And the scary confrontation with the real killer has a whiff of deus ex machina about it. But these quibbles aside, Milton does a conscientious job of dramatizing the arguments, drawing Elsa and Karl as real people in conflict, and nicely pacing the conversion.
A worthwhile read despite a simplification that might put some readers off.Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73206-342-6
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Nepperhan Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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