A pulsating portrait of the American fin-de-siecle, as immediate and unsettling as your morning newspaper, but more compulsively readable. Oates's (Black Water, 1992, etc.) darkly comic work — set against a background of industrial decline, urban decay, racial strife, and political corruption — is permeated by death, from its opening page, when Timothy Corcoran is gunned down in front of his house on Christmas Eve 1959, to the apparent suicide 32 years later of Marilee Plummet, a young black woman who has charged a radical black Union City, NY, councilman with rape. Oates sucks us into the flood-of-consciousness, the whirling vortex that is the mind of Tim's son, Jerome Andrew "Corky" Corcoran, on Memorial Day weekend 1992. Now 43, what does he think about, what does he live for? Sex, food, sex, drink, sex — anything to obliterate the memory of his father's bloody corpse, his mother's subsequent madness, his loneliness, his sense of impending doom. "Oh, Christ, he's happy, never so happy as at such a time, lips, tongue, teeth, fingers, his cock erect and bobbing...pure sensation and no memory of Jerome Corcoran now." Corky has hauled himself up from Union City's low-rent Irish Hill to become a successful real estate developer and city councilman. He is filled at once with vanity and self-loathing, proud of his $35,000 Caddy, his upper-crust ex-wife and equally upper-crust mistress. Yet, paranoid, he fears each smile from one of his friends is really a smirk of derision. Corky is not the best of men: He's just slapped his mistress around. Neither is he the worst of men: "In weakened states he tends to speak from the heart." His investments are turning sour; his ex-father-in-law and mentor has just refused him financial help; his rebellious stepdaughter has stolen the Luger automatic from his bedside drawer. This weekend will bring Corky the truth — about the corruption behind his father's death and the corruption of his own political friends. A moment of dignity will be within his grasp. Will he reach for it before it's too late? This question drives Oates's dazzling novel, brilliant both stylistically and in its depiction of a man running desperately for his life.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93836-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
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The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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