A historical novel as grand and ambitious as the characters and eras it portrays.
A former soldier with a mysterious past and a dark secret rises to financial prominence in Gore’s (The Gordian Knot, 2000) lengthy novel.
Daniel Durand isn’t your typical wealthy banker. For one, he’s an orphan who, as a young man, enlisted as a Union soldier in the Civil War for lack of a promising future. Second, Daniel bears a hardheaded will and level of honesty his more affluent contemporaries find shocking. He’s the kind of socially disadvantaged guy no one doubts will succeed. At the end of his career in the service, Daniel is wounded, witnesses his best friend Will’s death and abets a runaway slave. These moments haunt Daniel forever, particularly the latter, a violent memory Daniel buries. After returning home to Cleveland, and at friend’s suggestion, Daniel doggedly pursues a career in banking. His persistence pays off, scoring him a clerk gig at one Mr. Haverford’s bank, where Daniel quickly advances. Eventually, he steals Haverford’s bank manager and potential client, John Rockefeller, to start his own successful bank. But when he also attracts Haverford’s stunning daughter, Eleanor, he begins making enemies, most notably sinister Archer Winfield, whose ruthless family seeks to disrupt Daniel’s plan, which includes marrying Eleanor and relocating his family and career to New York, where his secret finally resurfaces. Gore efficiently moves through history, expertly rendering the Civil War’s horrific chaos and the lively Industrial Revolution. The war section is particularly moving, not only for its stark descriptions of weary soldiers bearing corpses through bogs and munching on maggot-infested hardtack, but also for its saber-sharp criticism of war. “We’re fodder, Danny,” Will says. “Do you think Sherman, Grant, or Lincoln care? They never would have made it to where they are if they did. Their appreciation for what we face, for risking our lives, goes no further than their pompous speeches.” On the other hand, despite the novel’s heft, the prose sometimes feels rushed and, therefore, melodramatic, as when Daniel discovers Will facedown in Vicksburg: “He crawled toward the body as fast as he could, pulling his rifle with one hand, scraping his other hand and knees on the dirt. Please don’t be Will. He reached the body and turned him over. Will.” But for a novel this size, Gore keeps his sentences readable and the story moving, so the nearly 800 pages go by quickly.
A historical novel as grand and ambitious as the characters and eras it portrays.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-1478267188
Page Count: 794
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
