Stately, low-key fiction from the well-known management guru: loosely connected vignettes (Drucker compares them to the movements of a quartet) from the lives of four distinguished Europeans who reach their later years around the turn-of-the-century. First there's Prince Sobieski, Austria's ambassador to England in 1906, who has just received a letter in which natural daughter Henrietta (the only person he really loves) begs the Prince to aid her husband's military career. The Prince can't disappoint her—but he can't behave unethically either. So before he comes to a compromise solution, he must review his life: mistresses; young cousin/wife Margit, who never minded the Prince's philandering (she even set him up with her dearest friend); the acquisition of great paintings; the building of a financial empire (thanks partly to training from the family estate's Jewish manager); and his avuncular concern over Margit's latest affair. Then the focus shifts to British mega-banker McGregor Hinton, who also faces an ethical crisis and reviews his life: his poor beginnings; his Drucker-esque education in math/philosophy; his noble secret marriage to a mulatto prostitute after she bore his deformed child (she's now dying of cancer); his brushes with aristocracy, J. P. Morgan, and Sandor Ferenczi (they discuss the Oedipus Complex); his London/Vienna banking coup and "entrepreneurial" vision; and, now, his decision to resign and tackle the 18th-century mathematicians. Next: Austrian Jewish banker Julius von Mosenthal, who's planning a major restructuring of the Bank of London & Austria; while brooding on the upcoming meeting with partners Hinton and Sobieski, he recalls his long-ago cockney mistress Shells, planning a reunion. (The resignation plans of Hinton and Sobieski will coincide perfectly with Julius' patriotic scheme.) And, finally, to balance all that finance with some culture, there's the life of Baroness Rafaela Wald-Reifnitz—descended from the purest Sephardic Jews, painted by two great artists, devoted to music, in love (despite rough times along the way) with problematic husband Arthur. Drueker doesn't really succeed in building a satisfactory chamber-piece from these separate, somewhat repetitious life-studies; the final section, in fact, doesn't work at all as a coda. And the interior-monologue style here becomes awfully dry and stilted, with page after page of "he mused" and "he thought" and "he continued to himself." Still: these are elegant people elegantly pondering diplomacy, etiquette, finance, adultery, anti-Semitism, history, old age, and the approaching Great War—and readers partial to a sedate, old-world sensibility will be richly rewarded.
Pub Date: June 1, 1982
ISBN: 0060149744
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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