In these tasty noir stylings, you can almost smell the smoke and hear the clinking of ice cubes.
A schoolteacher gets jumpy when her brother falls for sizzling hot dame.
Well, it’s not quite as sleazy as that, but this first novel has everything one could hope for in a noir without ever seeming imitative or stale. The author of The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir (not reviewed), Abbott knows just how to set her readers up for her taut little tale set, natch, in the City of Angels in the 1950s. Narrator Lora King is a quiet girl with no real romantic prospects. Not old but definitely not young, she’s a teacher who spends most of her time with her square-jawed and well-meaning brother Bill, an investigator for the DA’s office. When Bill gets married to Alice Steele, a drop-dead-gorgeous glamour girl who reeks of femme fatale, you’d think it would pull brother and sister apart. But even Lora has to admit that Alice, for all her mysterious past and near-neurotic levels of antic activity, seems like a pretty good wife, all said, with fancy dinner parties, cocktail hours with the neighbors, nightclub outings. Like the sister Lora never had, Alice even comes to teach at Lora’s school and gets her a boyfriend, a publicist she knows from back when she worked in movies. But, still, Lora can see the chinks in Alice’s façade. She knows that Alice’s friends look like trouble. And there are those rumors she’s starting to hear. . . . Not for Abbot are the self-conscious pastiches of Chandler imitators or the crazed spewings of a James Ellroy, but instead she gives us the true dark heart of the city in sharply contrasted blacks and whites, dense with heartache. Even though readers may be reminded of a dozen previous books or films, Abbott makes sure they won’t mistake this one for any but her own.
In these tasty noir stylings, you can almost smell the smoke and hear the clinking of ice cubes.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6170-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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