Hilarious first novel and sendup of the Mafia, by the author of Devil's Night (1990), Members of the Tribe (1988), etc. Foreign correspondent and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner William Gordon (real name ``Velvel'' Grossman to his Jewish family) comes home for a respite as a columnist on the Tribune, pursues his bisexual but largely lesbian movie-star girlfriend Jupiter Evans, and finds himself the main inheritor of his late uncle Max, a Jewish mobster whose ties to the Mafia go back 50 years. In fact, Uncle Max is second only to the Godfather himself, 77-year-old Don Luigi Spadafore, who sits home in Brooklyn and tries to speak as wisely as Don Corleone. When the will is read, Velvel's uncle has left him $500 million in businesses: ``fifteen percent of the action on the Brooklyn docks, a third of the union operation, the Colombian business, the lottery tickets....'' It's all there but it's not there—Don Luigi has assumed full ownership. However, Don Luigi's consigliere Carlo Sesti has had an inspired idea: to take Velvel into the family's more legitimate operations, on a $5 million retainer, plus one third of the future haul, if prizewinner Gordon will use his entree with the more crooked world leaders to expand the mob's territory on a global basis. Gordon feels burnt out as a columnist, thinks that endless wealth will help Jupiter resolve her bisexual problem, says yes. His older, closest friend, deputy city editor John Farrell, signs himself on as Velvel's consigliere for dealing with Carlo Sesti. Farrell is an irrepressibly outrageous drunk, the fount of the novel's bubbling fun, and his ``masterminding'' leads Velvel and himself into a full-scale war with Don Luigi's vast army of hoods. Freshness everywhere, especially when Velvel goes on Peter Jennings's evening news show to describe Don Luigi: ``This Luigi Spadafore is a ridiculous old man who sits around in a smoking jacket covered with spaghetti sauce and talks in parables that would embarrass a third grader.''
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-679-40263-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1991
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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