Terrifically exciting and likable first novel about tax lawyers and the Mafia, and a predictable success already sold to the movies, etc. Grisham does not cut as deep or furnish the occasional shining paragraph that Scott Turow does, but he writes a stripped, cliche-free page that grips and propels. Mitchell McDeere, married and tops in his class at Harvard, has great offers from several firms and is hungry for success. When Bendini, Lambert & Locke of Memphis snows him with money, a new BMW, a low-interest mortgage financed by the company, a huge clothing allowance and other incredible perks, (including early retirement as a multimillionaire), he seems to have landed in fairyland. Nothing is too much for the one new man a year the firm takes on. All that's required from him in a 90-hour week for several years and a fast hand at billing clients. Most of the firm's clients, seemingly all wealthy and ready to be billed unlimitedly, are content not to question the firm's methods at relieving their tax strain. For a while all looks legal. Then McDeere learns of the heavy mortality rate among the firm's lawyers: no one ever quits Bendini, Lambert & Locke. They die. It turns out that while the firm has many clients with clean hands, it nonetheless was set up by the Mafia as a pumphouse for siphoning drug dollars and other untaxed cash into phony corporations set up in the Cayman Islands. In fact, the firm's lavish Lear jet regularly hauls tons of US legal tender down to the islands with their hundreds of tax-haven banks and secret numbered accounts. Then the FBI chooses McDeere to be its chief informant and offers him its Witness Protection Program; otherwise, McDeere will be swept up in the forthcoming crackdown on the firm. Although the firm knows McDeere is a spy and sets him up for assassination, he is smarter than even the reader knows and fights back against both the firm and the FBI. Hallucinatory entertainment.
Pub Date: March 15, 1991
ISBN: 0440245923
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1991
SEEN & HEARD
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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