A novelist forcing cleverness is like a QB forcing throws into double coverage: prospects bleak.
The famed sportswriter’s blitz of one-liners sacks his latest football novel.
It’s not that the jokes are never funny; it’s just that they so seldom stop. Again and again—as was the case in Bump and Run (2000), to which this is a sequel—the effect is to strip a scene of its drama, or to undercut character credibility, the sine qua non of maintaining reader interest. Too bad, because Jack Molloy—a man with a code in a world that has no time for such abstractions—is a character people might like if they were allowed to take him seriously. More than a year has passed since Molloy’s New York Hawks, the team he inherited from his father, posted that stirring victory in the Super Bowl. Aside from swanning around in Europe, Molloy has done little with his life since, and nothing that could be considered positive. On the negative side, he’s managed to make a kind of Faustian bargain with a robber baron named Dick Miles, and when he wakes up to the starkness of its implications, he discovers he’s got scads of money and no football team. True enough, the title on the door says President, but controlling interest is owned by the rapscallion who euchred him out of it. Sobered by his own fecklessness, Molloy dedicates himself to retrieving what he once swore he’d never part with. Not easy. Shrewd as well as ruthless, Miles has attacked the Molloy support system, systematically dismantling it: friend and coach allowed to seek Green Bay pastures; secretary and all-purpose loyalist fired for bogus reasons; and so on. But Miles is about to learn what others have before him—it’s a mistake to underestimate an aroused Molloy.
A novelist forcing cleverness is like a QB forcing throws into double coverage: prospects bleak.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15082-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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