A rousing set of tales of a workaday PI.
Keenan’s (The Georgellen Club, 2017) short story collection details the misadventures of a Texan private investigator.
August Spivey isn’t like typical literary PIs, who are mostly embroiled in murder mysteries. Instead, he primarily serves people with papers, such as federal subpoenas or temporary restraining orders. However, these tasks can lead to shocking, sometimes-dangerous encounters, including confrontations with a violent tennis player (“When Nice Don’t Work”) and a particularly aggressive pit bull (“It’s What I Do”). The stories in this book portray August throughout his career, although the first-person narratives never specify the exact years in which they take place. They range from the day that he decided to move from bartending to PI work (“Life I Chose”) to his later years, when he acknowledges he can’t keep up with new technology. August also sometimes takes jobs outside process-serving, such as searching for construction siding that someone pilfered from his former Catholic school in “The Same Damn Dream” and, in a few stories, watching bartenders who may be stealing from their employers. The tales work well as stand-alones, although there are a few recurring characters, such as August’s wife, Sandy; his attorney brother, Jack; and fellow PI Chuckie Mays, as well as occasional references to other tales. August’s life is surprisingly riveting, with a fair amount of action, as multiple characters threaten him with a beating or a bullet. Most tales feature animated similes and metaphors (“sweating like a derby winner”; “a boxing match going on in my head”). Even the stories of his life outside work are engaging, as when he becomes deathly ill in “Another Close Call” or gets into a serious mishap while driving in the closing “And I Call Myself a Private Eye.” At other points, readers learn that August is a recovering alcoholic who suffers bouts of insomnia, but “A Day in the Life of August Spivey” takes an oddly mundane turn, detailing his meticulous daily routine of exercise and writing reports.
A rousing set of tales of a workaday PI.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73266-422-7
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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