A worm’s-eye fable of how Machiavellian General Douglas MacArthur, having won the war in the Pacific, goes on to wage peace against his subtle former adversaries. When V-J Day catapults MacArthur from five-star general to Supreme Commander of Occupied Japan, the old fox reacts as if he’s spent his entire life preparing for this chance. Laying siege to the princes and diplomats whose country his forces have so recently been bombing, MacArthur craftily wangles his way into a position of unprecedented power and prestige. The general sees his calling as a high one: to prepare the way to an orderly peacetime economy and culture for the conquered nation, to bring war criminals to speedy justice, and to urge a democratic constitution on a country whose dynastic history stretches back thousands of years. Yet his private prejudices and grievances, dispassionately recalled by his aide-de-camp, Captain Jay Marsh, sway his every plan, first obliquely and then ever more directly, as he vows to protect Emperor Hirohito’s family from prosecution because he needs an intact monarchy to sponsor his reforms, and as he prosecutes honorable, innocent General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Tiger of Malaya, for the 1937 rape of Nanking in order to shield perpetrators he can—t afford to accuse. MacArthur’s visionary flaws are echoed in a minor key by Jay, who, like his boss, compromises his romance with a beautiful Filipina at the Army’s behest, and—encouraged by the example of an exasperated prosecutor who manipulates MacArthur into dismissing him from the judge advocate’s staff and shipping him back stateside—ends up gambling his principles and future on an attempt to outmaneuver the wily general. Despite a lumbering opening and some plummy prose, Webb (Something to Die For, 1991, etc.) makes winning the Japanese peace look every bit as challenging and tragic as winning the war. (film rights to Scott Rudin/Paramount; Book-of-the-Month Club selection; $150,000 ad/promo budget; author tour)
Pub Date: April 28, 1999
ISBN: 0-7679-0076-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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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