Undisciplined if consistently entertaining account of a media sensation. But Sorrentino has burrowed deep into this violent...
A bold, multifaceted reconstruction of the aftermath of the 1974 kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Some army: just nine soldiers, and six of them will die in the fire that accompanies a shootout with the authorities in Los Angeles. Second-novelist Sorrentino (Sound on Sound, 1995) begins his story the day before that, as Tania (Patty’s guerrilla name) fires her carbine to protect her comrades, caught shoplifting. The three then commit five successive carjackings, while elsewhere their Field Marshal requisitions—from The People—the house where his group will die. This long opening section is fine edge-of-the-seat suspense. Then Sorrentino, tinkering with the historical record but keeping the fundamentals intact, tracks Tania and the other two survivors as they settle into different safe houses in the East, return to California, rob two banks in Sacramento and get nabbed in September 1975. They’re aided by a network of sympathizers, chief among them Guy Mock, a big-talking “radical sportswriter” who smells a megabucks book deal. The point of view constantly shifts. We hear from Tania’s parents; the FBI operations chief; Guy’s brother Ernest, who’s a lush and a snitch; a bank robbery victim; and the bewildered, conservative parents of other activists. There are odd digressions: Tania waitressing, undisguised, at a Borsht Belt resort; Guy peddling his book project in New York (clumsy satire). And there’s one more scene as suspenseful as that opening, when Guy is almost killed by the paranoid General Teko. The lasting impression is that the hard-core SLA members are, in the words of their sympathizers, “fucked-up sons of bitches” with no “clear channel to the truth.” Tania is pleasingly complex, bound to the group by the existential novelty of her situation and her newfound love of firearms.
Undisciplined if consistently entertaining account of a media sensation. But Sorrentino has burrowed deep into this violent counterculture without quite achieving the insights of, say, Joan Didion.Pub Date: July 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-27864-4
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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