Eye-catching Victoria Gotti, daughter of Godfather John Gotti, debuts as an accomplished thriller writer. Does Gotti's first novel feature her ties to her father? Well, John Gotti is here, but only psychically, in the form of two characters in conflict with each other. In DeCiccio's Restaurant on Boston's wharf, union strongman Joseph Sessio (read: John Gotti) is shot twice through the head. The power vacuum is filled by distinguished Senator Frank Morgan of Massachusetts (read: John Gotti), who was ushered into prominence long years before with union money derived in part from his father's old ties with the union as a bootlegger (the union moved his booze). The heroine is blond Taylor Brooke, a serious young lawyer with a pricey Boston firm who is tapped to defend Tommy Washington, the 19-year-old black busboy accused of shooting Sessio. But word is out that the rubout was set up by Sessio's son Mike, who wanted to take over his father's empire. Taylor finds herself befriended by the handsome, sensual, art-fancying Sessio, who tells her that he doesn't believe Washington killed his father. Thus, the murdered man's son is helping the defending attorney get his falsely accused father's murderer acquitted, although this points the finger only more strongly at himself. Taylor's background: Her mother was abandoned by her married lover, Frank Morgan (before he became senator), then became the alcoholic victim of a vehicular homicide. Taylor was raised in a Catholic girls' orphanage in Fall River, married and then fled from an abusive husband, assumed a new identity in Boston and, her career secretly underwritten by her guilt-ridden father, became a lawyer. Now dad hopes to mend fences. But bad people and a car-bomber are out to kill Taylor, as is her knife-bearing husband. Surprisingly effective throughout, until the parricidal final pages, which fly by too fast for credibility even for melodrama. Flashy but powerful.
Pub Date: March 10, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-86323-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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