Gritty street talk carefully rendered. But the story? Just plain over the top.
Ex-con gets revenge in a first from Moore, a social worker and former gang member.
Jonathan “JC” Collins stashed his share from the big ho-house robbery before his so-called friends betrayed him to save theyselfs. Now, ten years later, he out the joint and lookin’ for vengeance. Thugs, pimps, and ho’s bettah scurry when they see him comin’ and thass a fack. Fortunately (and somewhat improbably), no one touched the huge heap of money he hid under the floor of his mother’s unlocked garage. Seems like some niggah mighta thunk about where it was, but no. His betrayers have gone on to bigger and better things: Richie Kidman is a pimp among pimps, with twelve ho’s workin’ for him; Zo Johnson is a bigtime dealer; and Lil G, a con artist, makes a fortune cheatin’ fools out they money. In short, no one will miss any of these fine citizens, and JC has done ten years in prison on account of they big mouths. Yes, it’s payback time. Paying cash money for a shiny new Jaguar and a pimpadelic penthouse condo ain’t enough for JC. He needs the love of a good woman, and who should volunteer but Champagne, a former exotic dancer who turned a pretty penny blackmailing a few upstanding Republicans with a yen for kinky sex. She fine, real fine. An’ her love is true. Thirsting for battle and armed to the teeth, JC looks up prison pal Rat and his lady, Shaunna. The fearless foursome find that the three betrayers have fallen on hard times: Richie addicted to heroin; Zo in the clutches of psycho Cuban drug lords and facing competition from rival dealers; and Lil G arrested by the Feds. Just in case these gangstas aren’t enough, a strange new villain appears. It’s Peanut, your basic inner-city nightmare: psychopathic-sadist-rapist-necrophiliac-killer, with home-o-sexual tendencies. But he useful to the plot. Just don’t take away his peanut butter.
Gritty street talk carefully rendered. But the story? Just plain over the top.Pub Date: March 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-76066-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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