Ultra-busy exposÇ of lurid goings-on in suburbia, from the author of Blind Prophet (1983), as well as several paperback suspense novels. When Jack Murphy takes a fatal dive into his drained Long Island swimming pool, Phillie Liebowitz, his screenwriting partner, doesn't believe it was a suicide. (After all, womanizing Jack had just had hair implants.) So Phillie does some detective work. He raids Jack's computer and finds musings like ``Sex dominates my life.'' He also lunches with racy Judy, one of Jack's former lovers, who produces more heavy-breathing scribblings, these detailing Jack's passionate attachment to an S&M ``family.'' But then Judy is brutally murdered, and Phillie's a prime suspect. Dogged in his effort to get inside Jack's life, Phillie goes to Manhattan's Whips and Chains club and spends a night of bliss whipping a pert paid escort named Cee, who knew Jack. Cee gives Phillie clues that help him discover the nefarious plot that drove his partner to suicide. After a Madison Square Garden showdown in which Phillie runs over some second-string bad guys with a Zamboni, he limps home to Long Island to discover that the real villain is holding his family hostage. More than a simple whodunit, Davis's first attempt at noncategory fiction is a tawdry field-day of would-be-titillating mayhem. Sensationalist embellishments and subplots include a night out with a benevolent biker gang, multiple attacks on Phillie's life, a videotape with a deadly secret, a false HIV diagnosis, a multimillion-dollar will with anti-suicide provisions, Phillie's constant agonizing over his troubled relationship with his unfaithful wife, and a 15-minute session with a psychiatrist in which our hero gets to the roots of middle-aged angst. Davis actually has an earnest intentionto contrast the lure of life on the wild side with the rewards of long-term marriagebut this inquiry gets drowned out by the cacophonous clanks of unoiled plot machinery. (First printing of 30,000; Literary Guild alternate selection)
Pub Date: July 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-09690-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
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
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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