The welcome return of one of the two (along with George Smiley) most memorable characters in modern thrillers. Arkady Renko, the smart, humane, often despairing but idealistic and persistent Moscow detective introduced in Gorky Park (1981) and brought back in Polar Star (1989) and Red Square (1992) is still attempting to nail the bad guys. But in chaotic post—Soviet Russia, a world where the villains seem to be proliferating, his job keeps getting harder. Still reeling from a personal tragedy (likely to unsettle devoted readers of the series), Arkady seizes the opportunity to leave Moscow for a brief trip to Havana. His old acquaintance Pribluda, a KGB bureaucrat, has apparently turned up dead in the harbor. But is it Pribluda? The body is too decayed to allow definite identification. The Cubans, struggling to survive in a world without the Soviet Union, have a barely restrained loathing for Russians and no great interest in investigating the death. Arkady, who’s contemplating suicide and feeling useless and lost, is energized—hours after having entered Cuba—by an attempt on his life. He manages to kill his attacker, thereby becoming a figure of considerable interest to the small Russian diplomatic community and various factions in the Cuban government. With the help of Ofelia Osorio, a bright, competent, maverick policewoman, Arkady begins to sort out the tangled threads of the case. Smith has always demonstrated a genius for detail, and his powers are working at their peak here; his portraits of a threadbare, vibrant Havana, the various classes in Castro’s classless Cuba, and the resilient, sardonic Cuban response to an impoverished existence, are vivid, assured, and convincing. Smith has also always had a genius for complex conspiracies, and the one that Arkady and Ofelia uncover is typically audacious and believable. The climax, as Arkady struggles for his life in the waters of Havana Bay, is masterfully paced. A strong, satisfying addition to one of the most memorable and idiosyncratic series of modern thrillers. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection; Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-42662-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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