The question remains: Will a fan base built on blithe spirits take kindly to an unhappy Hap, enduring the angst of a midlife...
Those charming miscreants Hap Collins and Leonard Pine are back (Vanilla Ride, 2009, etc.), minus some of the charm.
For newbies: Hap Collins is emphatically hetero, Leonard Pine unabashedly gay. Sexual preferences aside, they are close as clones, prone to refer to themselves as brothers. Currently, Hap and Leonard have time on their hands. Not unusual. The two are chronically under-employed, which might explain the inordinate amount of mischief and mayhem they’ve been responsible for over the course of seven previous novels. Soon they are given a mission to accomplish, assigned to them by old friend Marvin Hanson, owner and operator of a somewhat idiosyncratic private-detective agency. Local thugs have made the mistake of mugging the wrong elderly woman, relieving her of $88 and then, quite gratuitously, breaking her arm. Turns out that Mrs. Johnson is a friend of Marvin’s, hence the assignment. A bone for a bone, think Hap and Leonard, baseball bats at the ready. Money retrieved, justice rendered and assignment duly completed, Hap and Leonard are in line for another, this one more substantive, and—what with wannabe vampires, the Dixie Mafia, plus a very active serial killer—significantly more dangerous. Consider, for instance, that there’s a contract out on Hap, who happens to be in the throes of a sudden and inexplicable psychological meltdown. Debilitated by a mysterious attack of melancholia, he needs all the help he can get and can’t get any from Leonard, who for complicated reasons is out of the picture at the moment. Enter the cavalry—in the lissome form of a former enemy. Bad guys fall, body bags fill and unhappy Hap seems sanguine once more.
The question remains: Will a fan base built on blithe spirits take kindly to an unhappy Hap, enduring the angst of a midlife crisis?Pub Date: March 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-27098-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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