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BLACK LIGHT

The veteran thriller writer's third tale featuring the honorable sniper Bob Lee Swagger (Point of Impact, 1992; Dirty White Boys, 1994). This time out, Swagger has to be coaxed into the fray by a young journalist, Russ Pewtie, who wants to write a book about Swagger's father, Earl, a western Arkansas highway patrolman killed in the line of duty in 1955. Russ's own father is a heroic trooper; there are certain parallels between a case his father handled and the way the elder Swagger died that Russ wants to explore. Bob Swagger has never quite confronted the facts surrounding his own father's murder, but Russ is the impetus he needs, and the two hit the road for the town of Blue Eye. Soon enough, it develops that someone doesn't want the two men snooping. They're nearly ambushed by ten professional gunmen on a forlorn mountain road, but Bob, being very good at his business, turns the tables. The bloody climax is cat-and-mouse stuff using state-of-the-art, heat-seeking nightscopes (the black light of the title), and Hunter ekes out every milligram of suspense, holding back his secrets until the last few pages. The best character here is an old lawyer, Sam, who's simultaneously in mad pursuit of the truth and forgetful of what he's doing. Hunter also has a nice touch depicting race relations in southwest Arkansas—he does not, much to his credit, try to impose modern views on Bob and Russ's fathers or their contemporaries. When Russ does library research, Hunter not only gets the procedure wrong but tries to make the utterly routine seem dangerous and complex, like something from Mission: Impossible. But, overall, the author is compulsively readable: His weapons scenes work, and so does his cliffhanger structure. (Literary Guild main selection; author tour)

Pub Date: May 20, 1996

ISBN: 0-385-48042-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

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