A long-thought-out espionage tale, about a dense and tangled search into the past that means to reveal something about the dense and tangled nature of man himself. Hyde (The Red Fox, 1985) again echoes le CarrÇ's bathysphere style and bottomless paragraphs, those shining flakes of analysis that lead into ever deeper analysis. Here, someone is out to kill retired naval security officer Jack Tannis, who lives near the China Lake Weapons Center in California's Mojave Desert. It was at China Lake that the air-to-air, heat-seeking Sidewinder missile, which gave total air superiority to US jet fighters, was invented and developed in the 50's. Somehow the Russians came up with an identical missile. China Lake scientist David Harper was set up to take the fall as the sellout spy. But intelligence officer Jack Tannis stood up for Harper, proved his innocence. Even so, Harper, discredited, lost all hope of pursuing a scientific career, went home to England, and became a nature photographer for public television. His wife Diana divorced him. Now, in 1985, Tannis finds himself almost assassinated in the desert; and then in the Welsh countryside, while hanging from a cliff-face and filming a rare eagle in flight, Harper too is the victim of an attempted murder. But...was he saved by a rope thrown to him by Tannis, whom he's not seen in 25 years? Tannis is gifted with somewhat magical powers of deduction, whose unleavings we follow inward leaf by leaf—a kind of parallel power to Harper's gift for semimagical infrared guidance systems. Harper's ex-wife Diana commits suicide but leaves behind a letter that eventually drives Harper into East Berlin and a search through the German rocket museum at Dorn, then to a cave on the rim of China Lake—where Tannis unknots the great mystery of Harper's life. Though its final unravelings become quite thin, and whether Hyde's endless deductive style really holds is questionable, this is a winner. Anyone reading to the end is presold on the genre and knows its shortfall.
Pub Date: May 7, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-41084-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
