The well-worn plot in which people are thrown together on a small boat and mortally threatened by both the forces of nature and the sort of evil that only people can devise is given full and effective treatment in this chill-a-minute thriller from Kennedy (Guard of Honor, 1993, etc.). Two troubled couples—Bill and Jeanne Chester, and Howard and Marilyn Hunter—arrive on Tortola for a vacation cruise on the yacht Cane Maiden. Bill's a teacher in an alternative school whose apparent lack of ambition frustrates his interior designer wife; Howard's a quick-tempered architect whose business is being destroyed by the faltering economy, driving a wedge between him and the more practical Marilyn. Those emotional difficulties are nothing compared to what happens when the captain of their vessel, Steve Berlind, kidnaps the quartet after tying up with a young woman who was acting as a ``mule'' for a major smuggler and has fled the botched hijacking of her latest shipment. Cindy Camilli wasn't part of that hijacking, but events have conspired to make it appear that she was, so there are some very dangerous people on her trail. They're after the more than $5 million in bearer bonds and diamonds she's still carrying, a jackpot that proves more than enough incentive for everyone involved to cross some lines they might never have imagined they would. Spouse turns against spouse, the balance of power shifts and shifts again, and a violent storm almost renders all the disagreements moot. Ultimately, the vacationers are confronted with a great moral dilemma, which finally strips away all their masks and pretensions. A spectacular helicopter attack on the battered ship and a deadly man-to-man confrontation ashore finally settle things. A superb story, with a perhaps not totally unexpected twist at the very end.
Pub Date: Feb. 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-11768-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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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