It’s the tallest of tall tales, of course, but it’s got robust drive, and Lashner (Veritas, 1997, etc.) deserves a tip of...
Victor Carl, Philly defense lawyer, sidles back onstage in Lashner’s latest legal melodrama.
It seems like an open-and-shut case. Here’s lawyer Guy Forrest, sitting outside his house in the Philly suburbs, naked, in the rain, his gun beside him; upstairs on the mattress lies his lover/fiancée, Hailey Prouix, dead by gunshot. A crime of passion, surely? That’s what Victor thinks, discounting Guy’s denials, and Victor should know: not only is he Guy’s close friend (they were at law school together), but he himself had been sleeping with Hailey, a femme fatale who had both men bewitched. Indeed, Guy had left his wife and family to live with her. When Guy is arrested, Victor represents him, vowing to himself to put him away. But the discovery that Guy and Hailey’s joint account has been cleaned out complicates matters. The key is a medical malpractice suit with Hailey and Guy on opposite sides: Hailey had seduced Guy in order to win massive damages for her client, and Guy’s naïveté convinces Victor that his old friend is innocent. Now the hunt is on for the real killer, and the long winding trail takes Victor to a nursing home outside Las Vegas, and then to the West Virginia town where Hailey was raised (and her high school sweetheart possibly murdered). Along the way, before the eventual courtroom theatrics, we’ll learn the Dark Secret that crippled Hailey and sent her twin sister into an asylum, a secret shamelessly embellished by Lashner’s use of Stephen Hawking and Sylvia Plath as props. Other trademark over-the-top flourishes include a knife-wielding lesbian in a dark alley and a hit man who has torn his skin to tatters in self-loathing.
It’s the tallest of tall tales, of course, but it’s got robust drive, and Lashner (Veritas, 1997, etc.) deserves a tip of the hat for Guy’s Houdini-like escape from that opening set-up.Pub Date: May 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-050816-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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