This ambitious, tightly plotted urban melodrama—a bold entry into Richard Price territory—is a real surprise, coming from the former American expatriate and author of such terse, claustrophobic novels as Thirst (1993) and The Primitive (1995). Amidon’s engrossing story is set in 1973 in Newton, Maryland, a “planned city” designed as a safe alternative to crime-infested and racially tense major eastern metropoli. Two longtime friends are major figures in the forging of Newton’s hopeful future: white attorney and “problem solver” Austin Swope; and black construction-company owner Earl Wooten. Ominous cracks begin appearing in the city’s placid facade: A brawl at the local Teen Center has caused extensive damage to property and Newton’s superego; fish are found floating dead in a man-made lake; quaint streetside gaslights are inexplicably exploding. Other crises quickly develop. When Wooten is called to Chicago by the city builders’ parent organization, Swope concludes that his old friend is being offered the post of city manager he had assumed would be his. Thus is Swope motivated to hire wounded Vietnam vet John Truax as a “confidential security consultant” assigned to monitor Earl’s movements and to profit from the conflict precipitated by the relationship between Wooten’s handsome son Joel and Truax’s beautiful (and white) daughter Susan. Truax, also, will be manipulated by the novel’s most interesting character, Swope’s brilliant, headstrong son Teddy, who is, in spite of himself, both Joel’s most devoted friend and his worst enemy. The ironies multiply as this solidly researched and deftly handled story plunges toward its dark conclusion: a “resolution” that echoes—convincingly—both Shakespeare’s Othello and Jim Thompson’s cruelly twisted tales of harsh retribution. Perhaps, like Newton itself, a tad too carefully planned to be real. But Amidon’s thriller will hold readers in its grip straight through to the powerful final page—and ought to make a crackerjack movie or miniseries too.
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-49762-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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
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
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