Charming, deftly amusing pastiche purporting to be the dictated memoirs of a 108-year-old scallywag who boxed, swindled, and seduced numerous historical personalities in his long life—and may even have started WW I, all while chasing the girl of his dreams. Departing from his customary gung-ho thrillers, Thayer (White Star, 1995, etc.) delivers a hilarious historical farce told through the eyes of Woodrow Lowe, a working-class Boston Irishman who, in 1879 at age 15, is smitten with the upper-class charms of Amy Balfour, daughter of the founder of the Massachusetts State Bank, when he stops the hard-drinking boxer John L. Sullivan from coldcocking her carriage horse. Amy and her snobbish brother Richard repulse Lowe's bumbling, shanty-town advances, with the grasping, mercenary Amy rudely ridiculing him. After abandoning his day job in his father's saloon, Lowe supports his nascent prizefighter's career by dusting the floor of Harvard's gym. There, on a bet, he knocks out future Rough Rider Theodore Roosevelt, who later befriends him, enlists him as a spy, and sends him out on a series of increasingly hairsbreadth (and ribald) adventures. Throughout his travels, Lowe survives by pluck and happy accidents, and even, eventually, finds true lust—in the arms of Tzu Hsi, the Empress Dowager of China. Along the way, he not only blunders up San Juan Hill with the Rough Riders but cuts a deal with Diamond Jim Brady that will enable him to avenge himself on the ever- disdainful, cruel Amy and her slimy brother. Ultimately, he gets his face carved into the whiskers of Roosevelt's moustache on Mount Rushmore. Writing in the tradition of Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, Thayer revels in the burlesque he adds to our otherwise overly romanticized past, gleefully transforming numerous well-known sacred cows—such as haughty Civil War General Philip Sheridan— into braying jackasses. In all, a breezy, impeccably researched picaresque: the best book of Thayer's career.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55611-512-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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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