Not even Ian Fleming hit the mark every time, and Gardner's latest James Bond pastiche, his ninth (soon he will have written more about Bond than Fleming did), reads as if it were written by a committee from a computer-generated summary of all the others. First, the supervillain: half-Chinese, half-Sioux Fu-Chu Lee (called Brokenclaw because his left hand has its thumb on the wrong side), who's kidnapped five scientists working on LORDS, a submarine signal detector, and LORDSDAY, its antidote, and who also plans to bring the world financial network to its knees by tapping into the computer bank of the New York Stock Exchange. Next, the counterplot: Bond will take the place of Peter Argentbright (a.k.a. Abelard)—a courier carrying Brokenclaw's payoff from the Chinese in return for the plans for LORDS and LORDSDAY—and will infiltrate the enemy's high-tech playground. Add some new faces in familiar roles—Sue Chi-Ho, who joins Bond in his masquerade, and Ed Rushia, the aw-shucks US Naval Intelligence officer running the show—to a cast including Bond's chief M and the usual hostile local law (here, the San Francisco FBI), and let 'er rip. Sadly, all too little ripping gets done: Bond watches a man following him get beaten to death; hears a long story about how Brokenclaw got his clutches into Wanda Man Song; and worries about whether he's going to go the way of that other Peter Abelard, but gets almost no chance to act like James Bond until his final face-off with this year's incarnation of evil—a competitive trial by torture described graphically but with a complete lack of conviction. Bond has always been most engaging when he takes himself least seriously, as in last year's Win, Lose, or Die. Not this time.
Pub Date: July 17, 1990
ISBN: 0425127214
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1990
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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