A jolting tour through the lower depths of the political machine so often shrouded in darkness and rhetoric.
Slacker speechwriter can’t remember when he last had an uncynical thought—then falls in love.
Ben Bergin is the worst kind of person you’d want working on a political campaign, or the best, and one of the merits of former speechwriter Mizner’s efforts here is that it’s difficult to tell which you’re supposed to think. A knock-around writer of sorts in his late 20s, Bergin affects a studied cynicism that he well knows is just a mask over growing despair: “It’s a story of sideline standing, of cleverly criticizing . . . of sleeping in and sleeping off, of laughing at myself and drinking to numb.” He’s a junior speechwriter for the campaign of Arnie Schecter, a New York congressman from Brooklyn who’s up for reelection—and, not surprisingly, the burned-out Bergin couldn’t really give a toss. He floats into the office after sleeping off the one he tied on the night before, and his drinking is now creeping into the daytime. He’s rudderless and in serious danger of becoming a walking casualty like Schecter’s campaign manager Danny, a horrid sight of middle-aged collapse, tamping down his desperation with food and cocaine. Just about all Bergin has to hang on to at this point is his coworker Calliopie Berkowitz, a shameless do-gooder who organizes the volunteers and flirts with Bergin during their regular rooftop smoke breaks. Not surprisingly, the self-destructive Bergin manages to snuff out whatever flame there might have been between him and Callie, and he spirals further into a sort of Gen-X self-immolation before finally being thrown a lifeline. First-novelist Mizner relates his scabrous tale with a welcome lack of hypocrisy, meaning that Bergin is for the most part pretty irredeemably awful, something no amount of self-awareness can erase: it’s this honesty that gives the novel its potent kick.
A jolting tour through the lower depths of the political machine so often shrouded in darkness and rhetoric.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2004
ISBN: 1-56947-386-2
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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
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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