The untidy Rube Goldberg aftermath to the shooting of ghetto beauty Lawanda de Bourbon by rookie cop James Rodriguez, traced in satiric detail by first-novelist Goldstone. Did Rodriguez gun down Lawanda in cold blood as she fled across a rooftop in a drug raid, or did he fire in self-defense after seeing a gun in the hand of the mistress of drug kingpin Ali Akbar Abdul (Triple A)? Despite the clean-cut cop's fervent avowals, no gun can be found in the courtyard where Lawanda fell; and opportunistic lawyer Herbert Whiffet, fresh from his triumph in protecting homeless vagrant Fruitful Willis from harassing/harassed deli owner Murray Platkin and armed with a videotape of the shooting by out-to-lunch main-chancer Fernando Rios, rallies the black community in demanding revenge. As Herbert tries to dodge the newly acquired investigative skills of TV newscaster Cornelia Pembroke and puts aside his rewarding liaison with informative assistant D.A. Renee Libermann-Smith (roused to revenge herself when she thinks he's been two-timing him with impossibly glamorous Cornelia, nÇe Karen Pzytriek) for a place on jailed Triple A`s legal staff, Murray's cashier Clarissa Taylor, thrown out of work when he closed his deli, finds her slide down the socioeconomic scale arrested temporarily by her son's employment by Ralph ``Uzi'' Jones, one of Triple A's top aides. Meanwhile, Internal Affairs investigator Phil Gagliardi and big-time defense attorney Meville Seltzer battle over the question of how (in the absence of hard evidence about the vanished gun) to slant the case so that Rodriguez will get off, or the department will come out looking good, or the cops can cut a deal to reduce Triple A's slaughter of innocents in the cross fire—all of this supplemented by a mercifully brief homily on whose rights are to be protected at the expense of whose. An amusingly overplotted Bonfire of the Vanities knockoff, minus Wolfe's epic sense of despair or fun.
Pub Date: March 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-877946-13-3
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992
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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