A jocose but pointed fable from Heffernan (Corsican Honor, 1992, etc.) pits aging executives against impatient young guns whose corporate strategies don't put people first. Jack Fallon's wife Trisha suddenly walks out on him after 24 years of more or less blissful wedlock. Badly jolted but stubbornly on the job as VP at Manhattan-based Waters Cable, the 49-year-old suburbanite learns through the grapevine that Carter Bennett, the company's unscrupulous young CFO, may be eyeing him, his senior associates, and their sizable pay packages as candidates for the big business equivalent of extinction. Instead of going quietly, Jack and his fellow targets resist the layoffs with preemptive strikes launched through a so-called Dinosaur Club they've organized. While their low-intensity revolt disrupts Carter's master plan to force as many older workers as possible from the payroll before instituting a mass dismissal, he presses on with a campaign of attrition. His presumed accomplice in this effort is Samantha Moore, a comely thirtysomething attorney who's been detailed to provide for a downsizing that won't result in a storm of discrimination suits. Increasingly disturbed by the nature of her big-chance assignment, Samantha eventually joins forces with the insurgents. In the meantime, Jack is being led a merry chase by the spouse from whom he's separated. The Vietnam vet nonetheless finds time to keep top management at bay and fall in love with clever Samantha, who returns his affections. The mechanics of how he and his over-the-hill gang turn the tables on their would-be tormentors will afford considerable comfort to those who believe age, experience, and cunning can overcome youth and enthusiasm almost every time. An enormously entertaining yarn that puts the concept of human resources in an arresting new perspective. (Film rights to Warner Bros.)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-14988-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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