Despite a promising premise, the book tries to do too much and never quite gets off the ground.
An ambitious debut novel about a plane crash investigation and the solitary survivor of the deadly accident.
Farrell tells two parallel stories that eventually intersect. Charlie Radford, who works for the National Transportation Safety Board, is on his first big assignment—probing the midair explosion of a passenger jet over southwestern Kansas. A would-be pilot grounded because of a heart condition, Charlie is anxious to prove himself and overcome feelings of inadequacy, engendered in part by his remote, alcoholic father. Erin Geraghty, a lawyer and mother of two, is chafing in a lackluster marriage (she’s also having an affair) and dealing with a recent diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. One day she boards a flight from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco that never reaches its destination. The author is good at building suspense around the cause of the air disaster as well as the fate of its unlikely survivor—a woman passenger who apparently tumbled through the sky and landed in a barn. He’s also good at describing the politics surrounding the investigation and the personalities of the NTSB team. A former pilot himself, he writes vividly, at times rhapsodically, about flying. Not so persuasive are his domestic scenes—for example, Charlie’s dust-ups with his wife, Wendy, who desperately wants a baby (Charlie resists); and Erin’s arguments with her lover, Adam, who presses her to reveal her identity as the “falling woman” (she demurs). Sole survivors of commercial plane crashes are not unheard of—the recent novel Dear Edward, about a young sole survivor, is based on a true story. Yet a number of plot points here strain credulity. And the musings on bravery, betrayal, the randomness of fate and the extraordinariness of the ordinary feel prosaic.
Despite a promising premise, the book tries to do too much and never quite gets off the ground.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-857-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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