sense of loyalty, made it easy to betray his country.
Brooding, creepy fictional biography of the Jewish-American chemist who became a courier for the Soviets before and
during WWII and was significant in the exposure of Klaus Fuchs and the conviction of the Rosenbergs. The sensational spy stories of the “50s have been deflated by post-Cold War revelations that information allegedly leaked by Americans accused of serving the Soviets was not all that consequential. After Whittaker Chambers, the most pathetic American to plead guilty to espionage during the Red scare, was introverted Harry Gold, who lived with his brother and Russian-born parents in Philadelphia. Gold, a profoundly uninteresting bachelor whose underwhelming presence deflated Hoover's attempt to cast him as the embodiment of evil, dictated several detailed confessions to the FBI. He testified as a prosecution witness against the Rosenbergs, served half of a 30-year prison sentence, and then worked as a researcher in a hospital, dying at his parents' house in 1972. Gold has none of the glitter that appeals to biographers, but, as fictionalized by Dillon (You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles, 1998, etc.), he becomes a classic le Carr‚ drudge, an intelligent, repressed social failure whose innocent urge to do good and suspicion of anti-Semitic Depression-era America make him an easy mark for Soviet recruiters. In dry, restrained prose, Dillon shows how Gold's hunger for human contact helps him ignore the hypocrisies and manipulations of his handlers. As a courier moving documents and money, he spends long hours on lonely trains, transfixed by the glamour his secret life provides. After building him up as an existential hero worthy of Graham Greene, Dillon piles on the irony, quoting long, patronizing passages from his trial and suggesting Gold's essential tragedy was that no one cared enough to know him. Intense, disturbing fictional portrait of a historical also-ran whose unshakable faith in human goodness, and deeply moving
sense of loyalty, made it easy to betray his country.Pub Date: April 21, 2000
ISBN: 1-58567-012-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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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