The story covers small territory, but it explores it in an insightful, amiable way.
Fried’s second novel (My Father’s Fighter, 2004) is a smart account of a New Yorker’s mid-life musings.
September 11th has passed and Bush is about to invade Iraq, but what’s really troubling Joseph Steiner is that, at 49, he has managed to lose his job as a TV executive. He knew the lay-offs were coming, but forewarning hardly compensates for the emasculation of middle-age joblessness. On a whim, he and his wife Mary, a left-wing publisher, accept an offer to join friends for Christmas in Paris, giving Joseph an opportunity to lick his wounds. Judith and Tad, American journalists stationed in Paris, have been sent to the frontlines to cover the war, and Joseph and Mary get to stay at their posh Saint Germain apartment and shop the Boulevard. The suspicion that his friends are leading better, more meaningful lives is reinforced when he meets up with other old buddies: Johnny, an American ex-pat involved in edgy Parisian theater and the recent recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, and Gilles, a handsome doctor married to a bestselling Irish author. As dinner discussions revolve around trite topics like Karl Lagerfeld’s newly slim figure, unhappy Joseph contemplates his own slightly pallid life, remembering his days as a reticent and self-conscious student in Paris. As their holiday comes to an end, Joseph and Mary have Christmas dinner at Gilles’s country chateau, where Joseph is confronted by an angry economist, whose harsh words—that Joseph is an emotional infant, a trait common among Americans—rings painfully true.
The story covers small territory, but it explores it in an insightful, amiable way.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-57962-114-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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