A manically funny farce both delightfully absurd and strangely plausible.
A psychiatric patient who believes he’s a British spy escapes from a mental institution and finds himself embroiled in real intrigue in this debut comedy.
James Flynn grew up in California and was orphaned when he was 10 years old, shuffled from one foster home to another. But as an adult, he’s convinced he works for the British Secret Service and that his home, the City of Roses Psychiatric Institute, is his agency’s headquarters. He speaks in a British accent, walks the halls in swanky suits, and habitually seduces fawning female nurses. When the institute is taken over by a new administration, headed by the insufferable Dr. Grossfarber, James escapes, confident that the Secret Service has been compromised by adversaries. He finds Sancho, a 22-year-old orderly at City of Roses, and drags him into the search for Dulcie Delgadillo, a beautiful, young drug addict released from the institute, who James believes has been kidnapped. Once at her apartment, he finds a loaded revolver and a duffel bag crammed with cash, which belong to Dulcie’s abusive boyfriend, Mike Croker, a motorcycle gang member involved in drug dealing. James uses the money to outfit himself in an Armani suit, buys an Aston Martin, and is pursued both by drug dealers intent on retrieving their stolen cash and the police looking to return him to the institute. James then stumbles on a major crime boss’s plot to kidnap the world’s 10 richest people in an attempt to profit from the global stock market collapse that he believes will ensue. Orkin pays comedic homage to Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the obvious fictional inspiration for James’ flights of deluded fantasy. But unlike that work’s treatment of Quixote’s hallucinations, it remains tantalizingly unclear if James is sane or not—he’s uncannily talented at being an action hero for someone theatrically posing as one. This is really a novella, at under 160 pages, and the plot moves at breakneck speed. The author’s prose is so buoyant that it borders on gleeful, with James dispensing words of wisdom to Sancho (“A man is like a teabag….You never know how strong he is until you dip him in hot water”). Orkin skillfully manages to create a story that is genuinely amusing, tenderly moving, and decidedly thoughtful.
A manically funny farce both delightfully absurd and strangely plausible.Pub Date: March 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77223-360-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Imajin Books
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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