Very slick, rather tense, sophisticated and amusing.
Big money lures a professional ghostwriter into a rush job—rewriting the memoirs of the former British prime minister in a month. By the way, the last guy on the job may have been murdered.
Harris (Imperium, 2006, etc.) returns with an amusing, fast-paced thriller that inserts a non-political writer into the life of an out-of-office but still controversial British politician, Adam Lang, who bears a marked resemblance to Tony Blair. Purely coincidental, of course. The narrator is a ghostwriter who, teasingly, is never named. He’s made a living turning the semi-reliable memories of a wide range of celebrities into readable “autobiographies,” a highly specialized career that, with his Cambridge education, makes him the right man to earn $250,000 turning the turgid draft of Lang’s memoirs into something someone would actually want to read. The publisher, having advanced $10,000,000 and committed to a publication date one month hence, is desperate. Lang’s longtime political assistant wrote the wretched draft after much research, but either flung himself or was flung from the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, where the ex-PM is holed up with wife and staff in the publisher’s cottage until the book is fixed. Just as the writer is getting a grasp on the work, Lang is charged by the World Court with war crimes for a deed he may have committed on behalf of the Yanks, who are still bogged down in Iraq. It’s the perfect hook for the rewrite, but the charge puts the household in a world-class dither. And it sends the writer deeper into Lang’s past. The more he learns, the less he likes Lang’s long involvement with the Americans, a relationship that cooked him politically in Britain. And the less he comes to trust Lang’s official memories. When he stumbles on materials collected by his late predecessor, it becomes clear that the dead biographer learned far too much about the politician—information that threatens everybody, including the ghostwriter.
Very slick, rather tense, sophisticated and amusing.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5181-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
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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