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THE GLOBAL WAR ON MORRIS

He may have meant to warn against fresh hubris, but humor is a tricky vehicle at a time when refugees, casualties and...

The entire U.S. anti-terror apparatus is trained on one hapless pharmaceutical salesman in this debut novel by a U.S. congressman from New York.

Morris Feldstein’s personal philosophy is “[d]on’t make waves,” but he winds up making a tsunami. He stumbles into a one-nighter—actually 22 minutes—with a doctor’s receptionist shortly after she’s had a bad date with a creep who adulterates stolen medications and sells them as legitimate. The creep connection and Dick Cheney’s need to boost the terror alert ahead of the 2004 Republican convention put Morris on the radar of several federal agencies. His dalliance also requires atonement by acceding to his wife’s demand for a condo in Florida. There, she befriends a young Muslim towel boy, one of four suicide-bombing volunteers in a terrorist group, who’s been waiting 30 months for a mission. Now Morris really has a connection to terrorists, and Cheney has the makings of a hot alert color. In a book dotted with Yiddish expressions from the first word—“tsuris,” or trouble—Morris, alas, is a schlub, while his wife, Rona, plays guilt-breeding Jewish mother to a nice Muslim boy who isn’t sure the 72 virgins are worth it. There’s a lot of cliché to these characters, which is fine for farce and for their main role of getting the feds into a high-tech version of the Keystone Kops. Israel has fun with the bureaucratic side of national security but offers few surprises, while his political jabs are rather flat and facile, and, after all, a decade late.

He may have meant to warn against fresh hubris, but humor is a tricky vehicle at a time when refugees, casualties and decapitations can make it hard to see the lighter side of any aspect of the war on terror.

Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-4767-7223-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014

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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

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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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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