Abysmally dumb terrorist novel whose plot would embarrass a Superman movie. Someone has blown up Wall Street. And it seems to be Green Band, a group of 26 disgruntled Vietnam veterans who are demolition experts and half of whom (including their one-armed leader Colonel David Hudson) suffer from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, or combat flashbacks, nightmares and extremely intrusive memories). First, Green Band (or was it?) vaporized some piers, then 14 buildings on Wall Street, including The Federal Reserve Bank, Salomon Brothers, Bankers Trust, Merrill-Lynch, U. S. Trust Corporation and The Depository Trust Company. Down in Washington, young President Justin Kearney is relying on Arch Carroll, head of the State Department Special Terrorist Force. A widower with four kids and a heavy drinking problem, Carroll thinks nothing of arresting terrorists with the warning "You have no rights?' or of personally blowing them away with a machine gun in a crowded Syrian restaurant in Brooklyn. Kearney is also relying on Caitlin Dillon, the most powerful woman on Wall Street and beautiful Director of Enforcement for the SEC, who finds herself falling for Carroll. As it happens, even Premier Yuri Belov—whose KGB directorate was supposedly handling "The Red Tuesday Plan" for the sabotage and disablement of Wall Street and the entire Western economic system—wonders who Green Band is and what its precise relationship to the Red Tuesday plot could be. The Red Tuesday plot had been hatched in Tripoli by the oil-producing nations, but as aged Wall Street seer Anton Birnbaum tells Caitlin, America is really ruled by the supersecret Committee of Twelve (the American Wise Men), and they have used Colonel Hudson and Green Band to foil the Red Tuesday plot. True, the buildings are gone but the massive theft of US credit on the world's stock exchanges and subsequent US economic depression has not happened. Watch out, though, because this is the kind of mind. bending plot in which the chief villain, the supreme international terrorist known as Monserrat, can also be the head of the FBI, himself a master of disguise who can slip into a women's changing room at Henri Bendel's and shoot his gorgeous Brazilian mistress while she stands there in sheer black panties, his hand on her breast. Deserves drowning.
Pub Date: June 1, 1986
ISBN: 0007796536
Page Count: 399
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1986
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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