A story with enough manic energy to be worthy of a nuclear explosion and enough to render moot any structural weaknesses in...
In Sandom’s doomsday thriller, a cryptanalyst and an oceanographer combine forces in an attempt to thwart a terrorist plan to inundate the eastern seaboard of the United States.
“What you need is something to make the Americans veer away from peace. Something abominable,” says jihadist El Aqrab, who has something abominable in mind: a mega-tsunami sweeping west across the Atlantic, generated by the aftereffects of his very own nuclear detonation. El Aqrab is a mean and devious dude; though he “destroys with an aesthetic sensibility,” as a Mossad agent notes, he is a pure force of darkness. Just so, he is in keeping with most of Sandom’s other characters: very bad, like El Aqrab, or very good, like code-breaker Decker (“the gentle features of a poet”), or good and gorgeous, like grad-student Swenson (“To be intelligent and to look like this? It was a fucking outrage.”). His characterization drifts into caricature, as stark and unambiguous as advertising copy. Sandom’s strength lies in the verve of his story, with writing that has both muscle, in its pacing and violence, and a measure of brains as it goes about knitting Islamic calligraphy into the action, as well as making skirmishes into cryptography, vulcan stimulation and the higher physics of radiation and isotope decay without force-feeding the dense material to the reader. Instances of sloppiness–actually, so sloppy they seem to have a hidden agenda: “Yung” for Jung, “Younkers” for Yonkers, “College Way” for Columbia University’s College Walk–are simply steamrolled by the tale’s gathering momentum. After a rather stately start, punctuated by little flurries of menace and barbarism from the stock bad guys, and a critical massing of feints and distractions, the story races from improbable to crazywild, all in good fun, with Sandom always one step ahead–and who cares if you can’t tell a “temperature-compensated quartz oscillator pressure transducer” from a toaster oven?
A story with enough manic energy to be worthy of a nuclear explosion and enough to render moot any structural weaknesses in its architecture.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4303-2714-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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