Victor Carl (Hostile Witness, 1995), defender of Philadelphia's biggest crooks, is still chasing the big score- -this time through the jungles of Belize—but he pauses long enough to explain how it turned out this way. And what an extravagant tale it is. Asked by histrionic megamillionaire pickle heiress Caroline Shaw to prove her sister Jackie didn't hang herself but was murdered, Victor agrees to pursue the case, but only as part of a contract for a wrongful- death suit that will guarantee him a fabulous percentage. Though she won't sign the contract, Caroline offers everything else, from access to her mad family rotting in a decaying mansion called Veritas—a covey of pansexuals who take turns trying to seduce Victor—to the ripe pleasures of her own tattooed, pierced, branded body. But this garden of earthly delights is overrun with snakes. There's the persistent rumor that Caroline's great-grandfather, Claudius Reddman, stole the pickle company from its founder, Elisha Poole, whose heirs have sworn vengeance. There's the discovery of generations-old skeletons in the family closets of Veritas. There's Jackie's $5 million insurance policy, which she signed over to a religious cult whose followers include a pair of transcendental mobsters eager for an earthly payoff. And there's her brother Eddie's indebtedness to a bookie who gets caught in the crossfire between two mob bosses battling for control of the city's rackets. Since Victor's secretly setting up Peter Cressi, another in his endless chain of lowlife clients, for godfather Enrico Raffaello, he ends up getting shot at, too. Amid all this preposterously inventive plotting, Lashner still finds time for cameos of a knowing gardener, a wounded doughboy, an accountant with the soul of a rabbi, a key witness who collects strangers' soiled haberdashery, and a dozen other refugees from gothic melodrama. Deliriously overstuffed extralegal intrigue—though the story moves with a self-approving gravity that suggests a serious weight problem. (First printing of 75,000; $125,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-039147-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
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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