The premise of Shames’s new Florida crime comedy couldn’t be simpler: a vacationing innocent is mistaken for an up-and-coming mobster. New Jersey furniture mogul Moe Kleinman doesn’t know that the Paradise Motel his new travel agent has booked the winner of his annual sales contest into is actually something of a gay nudist colony. Since Alan Tuschman, the big softie who’s been winning these contests almost every year, is not that kind of a guy, his vacation would look less than ideal even if nothing else went wrong. But plenty of other things do go wrong, starting, even before he’s checked into the Paradise, when a pair of hoods named Chop Parilla and Squid Berman misidentify Tuschman as Big Al Marracotta, the diminutive goodfella who’s not only taken over Nicky Scotto’s New York fish market franchise but fed Nicky some clams that violently disagreed with him. Nicky’s too fair to have the guy whacked, but he’s willing to pay Chop and Squid $30,000 to put him through a week of hell in the most fiendishly inventive ways they can. The only obstacles to Tuschman’s escalating nightmare are his equable attitude toward life’s little mishaps, his budding friendship with Big Al’s girlfriend Katy Sansone, and Squid’s unexpected artistic conscience, which won’t let any of his dirty tricks be cheap or easy. Fans will recognize the character types—the good-natured sucker, the under- average-IQ lowlifes, the moll with the heart of gold—from Shames’s earlier Mafia farces (Virgin Heat, 1997, etc.). What they won’t find here are the curlicues of twist and counterplot that make the tiniest oops resound throughout most of his novels like a belch at a funeral. What you see is what you get, and most readers will know long before hapless Tuschman does exactly what’s coming and when. The results are as tartly amusing as ever, but a lot more predictable—a good introduction for newcomers, but a letdown for fans.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-50252-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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