Doubling the stakes of John Grisham’s The Client, Krist plunges a pair of young heroes into peril that starts with a bang and ends with a bang-bang-bang. Two bright, college-bound Washington, D.C., teenage friends, Jason Rourke (white) and Dennis Monroe (black), leave a dull birthday party to score some marijuana. They end up in a grimy Northeast neighborhood alley where their drug deal turns sour and the supposed dealer is injured. The next day they find out he’s an undercover cop and he’s dead. Before they know it, the boys have become targets of a vast political conspiracy. After they—re set up by a drug find in their high school lockers, each vamooses in a different direction. Krist (Bad Chemistry, 1997, etc.) works the parallel plot lines for nonstop action. Jason is involved in a grisly murder scene in the Rock Creek Park horse stables. Dennis is kidnapped and held —handcuffed and hungry— in a damp basement. But the boys have enlisted a respected white journalism teacher, Renee Daniels, who in turn seeks help from an ex-lover, black FBI agent Frank Laroux. Renee steals files and uncovers the conspiracy the boys have stumbled on. Soon —big men in trouble— are disappearing, replaced by the dead bodies of —little men on the margins.— Krist cuts back and forth between the dramatic, racially inflected perils of the boys and the emotional reactions of their distressed parents. Jason hides out with Renee’s mother on the Eastern Shore, setting the scene for a heart stopping chase scene in a moonlit swamp. Dennis’s rescue involves a bumpy dune-buggy race across a beach. And even though his nonstop activity would seem to forbid a break for anything deeper, Krist manages some observations on strained parent/child relationships, difficult friendships, political subterfuge, guilt, loyalty, and sins of the past. Most readers will remember this wild ride, though, as a page-turner with new dangers and set-pieces every two minutes.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50080-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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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