Sometimes slow but always well-written and full of detail.
In this novel, based in part on the author’s legal experiences, a lawyer goes after two crooked doctors who have been performing unnecessary surgeries at a small-town hospital in Tennessee.
Doctors English and Herman have a good scam going. Herman informs patients that they need to have their gall bladders removed, then refers the patients to English, who performs the surgeries. Both doctors get paid handsomely, and the patients never realize there wasn’t anything wrong with their gall bladders in the first place. Things are going well until Dr. Patel, an osteopath at the hospital, wonders why a patient of English and Herman’s isn’t being sent to a bigger hospital, even though the patient’s rapidly deteriorating condition clearly suggests she should. Herman’s refusal to move her causes Patel to suspect he’s covering up something, but when Patel raises an objection with hospital administration, she quickly finds herself out of a job. When she talks to a lawyer, other cases come to light and eventually find their way to Benjamin Davis, an aggressive former Brooklynite now practicing law in Nashville. But English and Herman have assembled an impressive legal team of their own; someone on the defense side has even hired thugs to intimidate Davis, so he and his team face considerable effort—and danger—as they work tirelessly in their pursuit of justice. Written in crisp, clear prose, Turk’s debut novel is rich with legal detail. Sometimes, those details are a bit too rich, as the courtroom scenes seem to include every motion, question, instruction to the jury, etc. While fascinating from a legal perspective, these details cause pacing issues and, at times, drag the narrative to a crawl. The subplot involving the thugs who terrorize Davis and his team feels tacked on, and it never properly resolves. However, the quality of the writing coupled with the insider’s view of the cases—Turk is a retired attorney, and the novel is based on actual cases from his career—mostly make up for these shortfalls.
Sometimes slow but always well-written and full of detail.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9892663-0-7
Page Count: 375
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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