Podrug’s strong, crisp style excels at description, particularly in the Russian scenes.
Robbins’s sixth posthumous novel finds new co-writer Podrug outwriting the hormonal old ghost, as was the case with Sin City (2002).
Each of these postmortal works demands a handful of outrageously vulgar scenes to lend a juicy Robbins scent to the whole, and The Betrayers has its pubic pinks. The occupation Podrug digs into here is making vodka, with greed as the usual Robbins subtheme. And as in Podrug’s Presumed Guilty (1997), the hero has a Russian background. Nicholas Cutter is the son of an English communist who marries a Russian communist then finds himself at the mercy of Hitler’s thugs in the early ’30s in Berlin. The parents wind up back in Leningrad, where the father is murdered by Stalin and the mother dies during the siege of Leningrad. Nick, meanwhile, learns about the making of potato vodka. In 1949, he sails to British Honduras and is taken in by his beautiful aunt Sarah and her abusive husband, who run a sugarcane plantation. Nick gets into the black market for Mayan relics and also finds a use for blackstrap molasses: making vodka. Later, he goes to Colombia, takes over the plantation of widow Sarita Garcia, devises a vodka that supposedly boosts sexual prowess, and begins selling it throughout the Caribbean and in Boston. A trip to Havana enfolds him in glamour, and he wants to move his alcohol operation there, now making premium rum. But the Castro takeover forces him to set up his stills in the Dominican Republic, where he falls in love and lives with Luz, the most beautiful woman in the country. Then the dictator Trujillo, impotent from a prostate operation, uses Luz to bring him young girls for his sexual pleasure as a voyeur, watching women make love. But when Trujillo is assassinated, Luz is seen as an assassin.
Podrug’s strong, crisp style excels at description, particularly in the Russian scenes.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-30810-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
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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