A Big Apple transit cop's unsuspected taste for forbidden fruits brings him grief and self-awareness: an impressive first novel from New York Daily News columnist Daly. When plainclothes policeman Jack Swann (whose usual beat is the subway system) survives a Times Square shooting, he undergoes a gradual sea change. Cleared of culpability in the death of a black teenager who tried to grab his weapon, Swann begins to take a different view of himself and life. Coming into the light, as it were, the so-called cave cop realizes how little he has in common with coupon-clipping wife Ellen (who unself-consciously refers to herself as a redeemer). By stages, Swann loses weight and takes a second mortgage on his row house in Queens to get money for a more stylish wardrobe and for off-duty jaunts to Manhattan's fashionable watering holes; he even manages a two-day fling at the Plaza with Danica Neary, a lusty blond who was the unattainable object of his high-school fantasies. Swann also becomes more venturesome on the job, using himself and his borrowed bankroll as bait to bust muggers who prey on subway riders. Meanwhile, the working-class hero's behavior soon attracts the attention of superiors, who put the Internal Affairs Division on his tail. IAD operatives report Swann's nocturnal excursions to Ellen, who throws him out of the family home he's hocked. Eventually, the dark side (as it's called in cop talk) charges the officer with having skimmed money from a Harlem drug dealer he and his partner, hip black rookie Simone Colman, arrested in the course of their duties. Swann's conflicts with his department and himself are resolved, albeit with some ambiguity, in a climactic hearing that brings all the players together in a dingy municipal courtroom. A vivid and satisfying slice-of-life tale from an astute observer: Daly's grasp of the urban milieu of ethnic whites could make him heir to Jimmy Breslin's mantle.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-21709-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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