A detective tale that is heavier on ideas than story.
A private investigator is blackmailed into solving the most complex case of his career in this debut philosophical/mystery novel.
Private eye Jim is in the business of finding connections. “It’s what my brain is good at,” he explains. “It draws together pieces of random information that seem to belong to completely different fields but beneath the surface are in fact parts of the same iceberg.” But lately, his financial crimes cases have begun to bore him—all of economics is just a fraud, after all—and he is considering getting out of the game. After a friend tips him off to a coming danger, Jim boards a plane from New York to Brisbane, Australia, and continues to remote Fraser Island, hiding from society and learning to overcome his panic attacks. There, a mysterious stranger finds him and offers him the solution to a problem Jim has never been able to solve: the purpose of life on Earth. There is a hidden message encrypted in humans’ DNA, written by a creator. This enigmatic man, Jack, will tell Jim what it says—and release the detective’s daughter, who he has been taken hostage. But first Jim will have to solve a different riddle: one involving the entire economy of Japan, a computer virus called Zoe, and the search for a Chinese Max Planck. In this series opener, Topchiev’s prose is sharp and compelling, pulling readers through page after page. Unfortunately, Jim is a nearly intolerable and self-aggrandizing know-it-all: “I felt myself to be a rebel, an explorer. The Sherlock Holmes of defective societies, the Agatha Christie of group behavior, the Theseus of human nature trying to find a way out of the Minotaur’s maze. Now I’m nothing more than a sewage inspector, a parking warden, a police patroller.” His every conversation—and the book is little more than a series of conversations—quickly devolves into an abstracted discussion of economics, religion, politics, physics, or some other heady topic. Though these colloquies are often conceptually engaging, they keep the world of the novel from ever materializing, leaving the work feeling more like a series of undergraduate seminars than a mystery narrative.
A detective tale that is heavier on ideas than story.Pub Date: June 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-07-379929-9
Page Count: 347
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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