Downbeat, pungent slice of crooked-cop life, circa 1977 Chicago—and a rare nonseries outing for Campbell (the Jimmy Flannery novels: In a Pig's Eye, etc.; the Whistler novels: Sweet La-La Land, etc.). Sergeant Ray Sharkey is an archetypally bent cop—16 years on the force, ``his innocence...lost and gone forever,'' a savvy Irish loner protecting his many crooked deals by knowing how to show local pols a good time: ``the City Hall Pimp,'' he's called behind his back. But time's running out on Ray. A mayoral election is approaching, and the likely winner, known here only as ``the Candidate,'' thinks Ray will make the perfect target for an anticorruption campaign. And Ray's personal life is headed for the rocks, too—his cancer-stricken wife, whose medical bills drove him on the pad years ago, is near death; his redheaded beauty of a sister, Wilda, whose body he secretly craves, is breaking all the rules by hanging out with black musicians; and he himself, a racist born and bred, has tumbled into a nightmare of lust by falling for Roma Chounard, a black whore loaned him by top pimp Jasper Tourette. Still, as always, Ray needs money and can't resist a $5,000 payoff to get his brother, a judge, to throw a case—even though Ray knows that the deal's a sting orchestrated by the Candidate. And then there's the corpse found beaten to death in a fleabag hotel, with clues pointing toward Tourette and maybe even the Candidate himself. Using all his street smarts, Ray finesses the payoff and solves the murder, but he can't beat his own forbidden yearnings for Roma and his sister, which push him into an acts of cruelty and vengeance that finally bring the law crashing down on him. Tough-minded and authentic, but lacking the charm and mordancy of Campbell's series work; anyway, Joseph Wambaugh and Stephen Solomita, among others, have tracked this kind of dinosaur cop before.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70319-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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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