One last wrinkle before Caroline Masters accepts the presidential nomination for an appeals-court judgeship: She's been called back to Resolve, New Hampshire—to the family she hasn't spoken to for 20 years—to help a niece who's been arrested for murder. The Resolve police have found Brett Allen wandering near her family's woods naked, drunk, stoned, incapable of giving a coherent statement. When she does talk, it's to direct them to the body of her lover, James Case, whose plan to take Brett to California on $4,000 he'd withheld from his drug connection was cut short by a knife Caroline wastes no time in tracing to her family. Visiting among ghosts she thought she'd never see again- -her unloving father, Channing Masters, a retired prosecutor and judge; her half-sister Betty; Betty's husband Larry Allen, a spineless English professor; and Caroline's old onetime lover, Assistant Attorney General Jackson Watts—Caroline begins to counsel Brett and, inevitably, signs on as her attorney. As she probes Watts's star witness—Megan Race, the jealous lover who swore that James planned that California trip with her—for a weakness and contemplates breaking the law to impugn her testimony, a series of big, looping flashbacks reveals with increasingly ominous clarity why Caroline's always blamed herself for her mother's death; why she turned her back on her family so long ago; and, ultimately, who really killed James Case. Unfortunately, though, high-profile, high-stakes legal specialist Patterson dwells long enough and portentously enough on Caroline's sorry family history to give away his carefully planted surprises, strewn with all his customary generosity, to all but the most purblind readers. Patterson still spins mesmerizing courtroom scenes and creates a masterful narrative—the story purrs along like a velvet locomotive—but without that extra fillip of suspense that made Degree of Guilt (1993) and Eyes of a Child (1995) extraordinary. (First printing of 250,000; Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 8, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42989-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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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