One priceless lot to be sold at a closed auction, six high-rolling bidders, one million nefarious dodges: a second adventure for antique dealer Kay Williams (The Time of the Cricket, 1995). The prize is a Bowie knife reputed to have belonged to Jim Bowie himself, taken from his body at the Alamo and preserved by the same Mexican family for over 150 years. New Orleans oilman Billy Boy Watkins, determined to make “Old Bowie” the prize of his knife collection, is paying Kay big bucks to act as his agent. But she’s up against some stiff competition. Although Secret Service counterfeiting investigator Roy Scanner can’t be counted a serious competitor, catty San Francisco antiquer Melanie Wadsworth, wealthy Long Island collector Arthur Ward, Japanese insurance mogul Kazuo Goto, and Leon Donin, from Moscow’s Koska Museum, are all as determined as Billy Boy to own the fabled weapon. And some aren’t very fussy about the tactics they—ll use to narrow the field of bidders. Donin’s gone so far as to hire as his bodyguard Bud Wolf, a homegrown hit man, who has designs on the knife himself, and Kay’s impecunious ex, Phil, has turned up in Austin with his thuggish Jamaican partner to grab whatever spare cash he can find lying around. All the bidders have different weaknesses—the counterfeiting subplot is especially well-turned—and except for Kay they’re all willing to use sex or intimidation or violence or whatever else works to bully or trick each other into retiring from the fray. By introducing and killing off subsidiary characters, Blankenship manages, ingeniously and often miraculously, to bring his story to a boil while keeping all six bidders alive for the auction (though a shootout goes on a mite too long), but it wouldn’t pay to sell any insurance once the bidding starts. Nimble variations on a predictable suspense formula. Few readers will be fooled by the wiles of the treacherous knife-hunters, but most will get their money’s worth, which is more than you can say of the characters.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55611-548-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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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