A warmed-over Bernard Samson (Spy Sinker, 1990, etc.) thriller that is sorely lacking violence, action, sex, bad guys, espionage, and high technology. It's the summer of 1987, and British spy Bernard is going through a difficult time. His wife, Fiona (also a secret agent), has just returned from East Germany, where she's spent enough time pretending to have defected that Bernard fell in love with another agent named Gloria, moved in with her, and watched her become the new mother to his and Fiona's prepubescent kids. But a few weeks ago, Fiona returned a hero and Bernard has had to dump Gloria, deal with not having been trusted with the truth of Fiona's mission, and cope with the guilt of the death of Fiona's sister Tessa, which reportedly occurred at the scene of Fiona's return to the West, although there's no body and lots of mystery surrounding who did it and why. Before Bernard has a chance to settle back into a life with Fiona, he's sent on a mission to make contact with a communist agent named Verdi, who London Central tells him wants to defect with passwords to East Germany's newly activated computerized intelligence material. Bernard visits his old East German haunts, gets into a few fistfights (but alas, only one shoot-out—and the bad guys don't even shoot back), sees some old friends, watches Fiona become his boss's right hand, learns of his wife's secret plan to uncover the truth of her sister's disappearance, and hears from Gloria that Fiona is undermining her family in a vicious act of revenge. The scene is set but nothing gets resolved. Bernard learns that Tessa may still be alive and in prison but, so as not to make waves, keeps this detail to himself. Gloria's suspicions about Fiona never get confirmed either way. Bernard successfully brings Verdi to London but then loses him to a sniper, destroying any chance of accessing the opposition's files. With vapid characters, murky plot, and infelicitous descriptions that include ``our footsteps crunching in the gravel like a company of soldiers marching though a bowl of cornflakes,'' this caper leaves you cold. (125,00 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017622-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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
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
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