A photographer with a military past leads a search through Switzerland for a brilliant, spectacularly vile terrorist—in a gory but consistently clever thriller. The villain in this flamboyant first novel is the brilliant, illegitimate son of a senior CIA official and a Cuban woman; he operates under several identities but is known to his hunters as ``The Hangman.'' Photographer Hugo Fitzduane, current occupant of his family's ancient Irish castle, has his first run-in with The Hangman when he bumps into a Swiss college student...who's swaying from the end of a rope in a gloomy copse on Fitzduane's island. The boy had been studying at a college for rich brats, and his death is the first of three at the school where extracurricular activities appear to run to the occult. Offended and intrigued, Fitzduane detaches himself from the charms and skills of his thoroughly liberated news anchorette girlfriend and, after consulting with his old Irish Ranger pals, flies off to Bern, Switzerland, to find out how the dead lad could have become suicidal and just what is the meaning of the letter A and the geraniums on his discreet little tattoo. Fitzduane is a severe shock to the Swiss system. Everywhere he goes accidents happen, bullets fly, bodies drop, and blood flows. The patience of the police is sorely tested, but Fitzduane's swashbuckling investigation begins to pin down the location and a few of the identities of The Hangman, who is busy executing his latest, greatest scheme—which he hopes will make him the richest psychotic sadistic homosexual international terrorist in the business (after which he plans to retire). Everything comes to a head back in Ireland, where Fitzduane's castle proves its worth as a fortress after all these centuries. Freewheeling gore, sex, and violence presented skillfully and with plenty of good humor. Switzerland can be expected to sue.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8021-1431-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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