It’s not the paucity of action but the flawed characterizations that hurt this oppressive work the most.
Serial killer bonds with cop in a first novel with a high body count.
The first corpse shows up in the prologue. Val Millimaki, only 12 and a devout altar boy, finds his mother in a barn on their Montana farm; she has hanged herself. Without missing a beat, the novel confronts us with an old man, in open country, shooting to death a man he’s robbed, cutting off his head and hands and directing his accomplice to bury him. The old man, John Gload, has been burying anonymous victims for years. Then we're back to Millimaki, now grown and a sheriff’s deputy, tracking a lost skier in the mountains with his dog; they find her dead. Subsequently they’ll track down three more missing people, all found dead. The grim stats have taken a toll on the introspective deputy and strained his marriage to Glenda, an ICU nurse better able to handle death. Meanwhile, Gload has been arrested (the accomplice snitched), and Millimaki has been given the graveyard shift to guard him and pry loose details of old crimes. The two discover they were both farm kids, plowing the fields. Gload reveals he first killed during a home invasion at 14 and understood this would be his line of work, a remarkable insight for such a young dude. Their late-night talks, Gload hulking behind bars like a zoo animal, dominate the novel. Millimaki can’t sleep; Glenda has left him; and his tracking results deepen his misery. His failure to press Gload on the mysterious disappearance of his live-in girlfriend, Francie, typifies his dullness of spirit. Gload will manage one last kill, monster that he is, but sadly, he’s not an interesting monster.
It’s not the paucity of action but the flawed characterizations that hurt this oppressive work the most.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9951-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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