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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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