Tolkien knows his way around a courtroom, that’s for sure, but that doesn’t stop him from resorting to Perry Mason–like...
Standard-issue murder-mystery dramatics unfold in a world far, far away from Middle Earth.
Yes, he’s one of those Tolkiens. This being the debut novel from the 43-year-old London barrister—and grandson of the late, great J.R.R.—Simon is not exactly what you would expect, considering the family name, and that’s most likely a good thing. Undoubtedly, there’s another family member out there wondering why The Lord of the Rings had to end. In any case, Simon’s first book is not about elves or magic at all, but rather something closer to Jeffrey Archer territory. Sixteen-year-old Thomas Robinson is the bookish and retiring son of England’s rather imperious defense minister, Sir Peter Robinson. Lady Anne, Thomas’s mother and Peter’s wife, was murdered a year before the story opens by a couple of thugs plundering the ancestral manse. Only things aren’t quite as simple as that. Peter’s rather too-efficient personal assistant, Greta, had been hanging about the house quite before that, and Anne, being a sensible upper-class British wife, knew a gold digger when she saw one. Tensions had been running high, and Peter had as much as moved out by the time of the murder. To the horror of the already devastated Peter, Thomas accused Greta of the murder. All of this is laid out before the reader in a series of flashbacks that jump back to different points in the tumultuous previous two years and then snap forward to the future and the high-profile murder trial of Lady Greta Robinson. Thomas is obviously terrified, as the same men who killed Anne have already come back to the house once to kill him. There’s nothing exactly wrong with what transpires here: Final Witness is efficiently rendered stuff, but there’s little to shout about.
Tolkien knows his way around a courtroom, that’s for sure, but that doesn’t stop him from resorting to Perry Mason–like cliché if the mood strikes him.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50882-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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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