Primary Colors meets George V. Higgins in this tangy tale of Boston politics by a former Massachusetts governor who surely never saw any of this stuff himself. Nobody’s more surprised than Terrence Mullally when he’s tapped to challenge veteran Suffolk County D.A. Marty Gross in the all-important Democratic primary. Terry doesn’t have Gross’s experience or his connections—he’s an orphan only recently exiled to Beantown by a questionable immunization of his childhood mentor, Det. Sgt. Joseph Ballaster (“Joe Balls”), which got him chased out of the US Attorney’s office in Brooklyn—and he doesn—t have any compelling reason to run against him. What he does have is a practiced ease in addressing crowds of strangers, a bottomless supply of charm, and a demon campaign manager, Lanny Green, out of the AFL-CIO’s Washington office. The combination propels Terry through a series of amusingly interchangeable smokers (one of them kicked off by the line “Fellow designated drivers!”), strategy sessions, and ascensions to the haunts of some serious old money, where he meets Emma Gallaudette, whose money is neither old nor serious. Emma would be the perfect mate for Terry if she weren’t already married, but since her well-heeled, indifferent husband Elijah Low is away indefinitely in Hong Kong, she does fine as an imperfect mate, buoying Terry up till he’s chased Gross (and, in a finely anticlimactic sequence, his Republican opponent) from the scene and settled in to make a completely new set of enemies among local politicos, journalists, and suddenly unemployed Suffolk County prosecutors. And still it’s not enough for Terry, who can’t resist challenging an ineffectual Massachusetts senator for his seat. The inevitable reversal, which features Joe Balls’s buddy, NYPD Lt. Rudy Solano, and Elijah Low in darker roles, seems at first a lot more moralistic than it actually is. A torrent of lovely, nasty upstairs/downstairs chat, though the stop-and-go rhythm of the story and the thinness of characters who aren’t Terry reminds you that Weld, for all his rough-and-tumble expertise, is no Anonymous. (First serial to George)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-85346-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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