Gardner, best known for his airheaded and highly successful pastiches of Superman James Bond, here completes the marvelous generational trilogy begun with The Secret Generations and The Secret Houses: the elegant, sedate, intricate, richly layered story of those inveterate British agents, the Railtons. A rumor soon after the 1964 funeral of Sir Caspar Railton, the patriarch of the clan, hinting that Caspar may have been a Soviet agent for the past 30 years, starts his nephew Donald (Naldo), of the Secret Information Service, on a quest to clear Caspar's name and burn the rumor's source. Leaving his long-suffering wife Barbara and his children and dropping out of sight with his American cousin, the CIA agent Arnold Farthing, Naldo soon finds himself inside the USSR for a period that stretches to five years—and culminates in a shattering though long-expected betrayal. By the time he returns, the SIS has long since given up on him as another Soviet agent, he has married the daughter of his uncle's archenemy (the legendary Russian agent Spatukin), and he has learned that Caspar had laid a posthumous trail of suspicion against himself back in the 30's as part of a deep plot to root out Soviet sympathizers in the SIS. As it becomes clear that Caspar's plan is to trap another Soviet agent too close to finger, Naldo works in alliance with his dead uncle to uncover the traitor within his own clan—which, as readers of the earlier Railton stories will know, has always been honeycombed with double and triple agents. Throughout, Gardner constantly links the saga of the Railtons to public history by dark hints about Cuba, Dallas, and Vietnam before Naldo finally unmasks the traitor at the price of decimating his family. A wonderfully absorbing and moving conclusion to the Railton trilogy. Given the evidence here, can't someone get an injunction against the return of James Bond?
Pub Date: April 19, 1989
ISBN: 399-13397-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
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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