Charlie’s likable, and the baseball set pieces are beyond reproach, but Lupica’s signature one-liners (Bump and Run, 2000,...
Scouting report on sportswriter Lupica’s baseball novel: pretty good stuff, needs to work on control.
Once upon a time “Showtime” Charlie Stoddard had a golden arm, among the best ever to make it to “the Bigs.” But he abused it—sorely—and the rest of himself as well: booze and babes, Charley a committed hedonist from the time he could spell party. Actually, he abused just about everything in his life, including his relationship with his furiously resentful son and long-resigned wife. As the story opens, he’s 40, five years away from his last (dismal) appearance on a professional mound, spending his time signing autographs for money and chasing women from habit. Enter fate, in the form of a Chinese-American wonder-working physical therapist who offers him what so few of us ever get: a second chance. Charlie’s been messed up by knife-happy quacks, Mr. Chang tells him, but he’s salvageable if he’s willing to work. Charlie and Chang become a team, and almost at once redemption sets in: 90 m.p.h fastballs and an arm free of debilitating pain. In the meantime, the Boston Red Sox, battling a variety of famous jinxes (see any history of baseball) and the hated New York Yankees as well are in desperate need of pitching help, so desperate they’re willing to gamble on Charlie. Moving into the climactic stage of the pennant race, the Sox have a staff composed largely of cripples and one potential Hall-of-Famer. He’s Tom Mackenzie, born Tom Stoddard, who changed his name as a measure of intense filial disregard. So now when Showtime Charlie stares in for his signal, he swiftly learns it’s a whole new ballgame.
Charlie’s likable, and the baseball set pieces are beyond reproach, but Lupica’s signature one-liners (Bump and Run, 2000, etc.) are relentless, consistently cutting the heart out of key emotional scenes.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14927-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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