Even more than in previous frothy capers, Dunnett's taciturn, super-cool hero Johnson Johnson (portrait-painter/secret-agent) takes a back seat to a quirky female narrator: this time it's punk-haired, tough little Rita Geddes, a Scottish makeup artist—and a protege of Hollywood's legendary, about-to-retire Kim-Jim Curtis. (He's part of a make-up man dynasty a la Westmore.) Thanks to Kim-Jim, Rita gets a lush job as private make-upper to celebrity-journalist Natalie Sheridan on the isle of Madeira. But the new job soon sours: Rita is attacked by Natalie's erstwhile lover Roger van Diemen, a dope-addict/dealer who's jealous of Natalie's liaison with Kim-Jim; then dear Kim-Jim is dead at Natalie's villa—an apparent suicide but really a murder victim. The obvious suspect? The now-vanished van Diemen, who's part of a drug-ring which Johnson Johnson (a quiet bystander thus far) is trailing. So, though Rita is sure that Johnson's "a poof and a bastard," the two team up to avenge Kim-Jim—heading for the West Indies, where the drug-ring seems to be centered. . . and where Kim-Jim's various, nasty relatives live. And, after some gory violence, an ordeal-at-sea, and reliable sailing action (the Doily of the title is Johnson's yacht, you'll remember), the full extent of the drug-dealing conspiracy is revealed—along with some related secrets about narrator Rita herself. . . who hasn't been playing fair with the reader. As usual, then, Dunnett doesn't offer a very convincing or satisfying plot; the pacing is uncertain—first draggy, then frantic; and some of the oblique comedy (e.g., Rita's cute hatred for Johnson) is merely precious. But fans of the frou-frou-style English mystery (modeled on Allingham, not Sayers, Marsh, or Christie) will again find much to enjoy—in the arched-eyebrow dialogue, the glittery international backgrounds, and the undeniable singularity of combative heroine Rita.
Pub Date: March 7, 1984
ISBN: 0394729269
Page Count: 315
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1984
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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