Ultra-busy exposÇ of lurid goings-on in suburbia, from the author of Blind Prophet (1983), as well as several paperback suspense novels. When Jack Murphy takes a fatal dive into his drained Long Island swimming pool, Phillie Liebowitz, his screenwriting partner, doesn't believe it was a suicide. (After all, womanizing Jack had just had hair implants.) So Phillie does some detective work. He raids Jack's computer and finds musings like ``Sex dominates my life.'' He also lunches with racy Judy, one of Jack's former lovers, who produces more heavy-breathing scribblings, these detailing Jack's passionate attachment to an S&M ``family.'' But then Judy is brutally murdered, and Phillie's a prime suspect. Dogged in his effort to get inside Jack's life, Phillie goes to Manhattan's Whips and Chains club and spends a night of bliss whipping a pert paid escort named Cee, who knew Jack. Cee gives Phillie clues that help him discover the nefarious plot that drove his partner to suicide. After a Madison Square Garden showdown in which Phillie runs over some second-string bad guys with a Zamboni, he limps home to Long Island to discover that the real villain is holding his family hostage. More than a simple whodunit, Davis's first attempt at noncategory fiction is a tawdry field-day of would-be-titillating mayhem. Sensationalist embellishments and subplots include a night out with a benevolent biker gang, multiple attacks on Phillie's life, a videotape with a deadly secret, a false HIV diagnosis, a multimillion-dollar will with anti-suicide provisions, Phillie's constant agonizing over his troubled relationship with his unfaithful wife, and a 15-minute session with a psychiatrist in which our hero gets to the roots of middle-aged angst. Davis actually has an earnest intentionto contrast the lure of life on the wild side with the rewards of long-term marriagebut this inquiry gets drowned out by the cacophonous clanks of unoiled plot machinery. (First printing of 30,000; Literary Guild alternate selection)
Pub Date: July 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-09690-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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