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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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