A solidly grounded rendering of cop culture, but spotty as a story of personal redemption.
In her latest novel, editor and essayist Golden (Don’t Play in the Sun, 2004, etc.) examines the vexing problem of cops who kill unarmed civilians.
It’s night when a traffic stop goes bad for officer Carson Blake. Carson, 12 years on the force, has never fired his gun. Afraid for his life, he shoots the driver dead, realizing too late the driver’s gun was a cell phone. This happens in a deserted parking lot in suburban Maryland; both Carson and the victim are black. Golden shows both men at fault: Carson should have waited for backup; the victim should have stayed on the ground and kept his hands away from his waistband. What comes next for Carson is anguished remorse and endless bad dreams. He’s a decent man; no saint, but certainly not a psycho. He and his wife Bunny, a commercial artist, live comfortable lives, with three beautiful kids. Carson’s low point comes when he puts a gun in his mouth; he is saved by a vision of his loving family. Then come sessions with Carrie Petersen, cop-turned-therapist. Carson talks about his harsh father, Jimmy; the revelation that he was not his actual daddy drove him to the streets, where he felt in control as he mugged easy victims. Control. Isn’t that why Carson joined the force, probes Carrie? Reluctantly, Carson agrees. Though he is cleared by a grand jury and Internal Affairs, Carson still feels far from redemption. All this is entirely credible, but here Golden falters, switching for a while to the grieving parents of the victim, then jumping forward two years (Carson has left the force and become, implausibly, a real-estate agent), and lastly having his stepfather’s hatefulness surface in Carson, who tears into his 15-year-old son Juwan for being gay. It’s too late in the game for these eruptions, which distract from Carson’s attempt to make peace with the victim’s family.
A solidly grounded rendering of cop culture, but spotty as a story of personal redemption.Pub Date: May 16, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51222-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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
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
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