Deploying an inimitable tone that packs sardonic storytelling atop action and adventure, with a side of character...
Aided by an obliging grifter, a Brooklyn grandma on the run tries to mend her relationship with her estranged grandchild as the three outrun mob goons in the latest from Boyle (The Lonely Witness, 2018, etc.).
Things haven’t been good for Rena Ruggeiro ever since the death of her husband, Vic, nine years ago and her realization that her daughter, Adrienne, had been running around with Vic’s right-hand man, Richie Schiavano, since high school. In spite of Vic’s connections, Rena’s always kept her nose clean and stuck to her routine in her Bensonhurst community, beginning with Mass and McDonald’s coffee every Sunday. There’s no sense in Rena getting overexcited like Adrienne would. After all, Adrienne hasn’t spoken to Rena ever since Rena said her piece about Richie and his quality as a partner. Now, however, Adrienne has a 15-year-old daughter, Lucia, who doesn’t even know her grandmother. Rena ponders these problems but doesn’t act until her pushy neighbor, Enzio, makes a move and she wallops him with an ashtray that brings him down and maybe kills him. What can she do but grab the keys to his classic Impala and high-tail it to the Bronx in the hopes that Adrienne’s in a charitable mood and can help her sort things out? But Adrienne is much the same, and Rena finds herself trying to figure out her next step as she sits in the living room of Adrienne’s neighbor Lacey "Wolfie" Wolfstein, a soft-core porn star–turned–con artist who’s taken a shine to Lucia. All this is prologue to the real drama, a caper-inspired road story of quirky personalities on the run littered with gruesome deaths as the truth about the hit on Vic comes out—along with so much more.
Deploying an inimitable tone that packs sardonic storytelling atop action and adventure, with a side of character development, Boyle’s voice works even when it feels like it shouldn’t. It’s just the right kind of too much.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-058-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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