Kilroy deftly characterizes the absurdity of a land grab, though within a curiously limited range of characters.
The recent Irish property bubble fuels this story of an ill-fated developer and the mysterious, diabolical figure who supports him.
We meet Tristram St. Lawrence, the narrator of Kilroy’s fourth novel (Tenderwire, 2006), during a crash landing in his native Dublin, an experience that prompts him to think about drinking again and also reunites him with Hickey, a childhood friend. It’s 2006, and Hickey is doing well in the speculative business of residential and hotel developments; rezoning an industrial park for hotel rooms and condos is as easy as paying a “fee” to a minister, and desolate, abandoned farmland can be valuable if you can persuade the same minister to reroute a train line there. Hickey is the stereotypical muscle while Tristram is the brains, with the financial support of a Mr. Deauville (note the name), who is also Tristram’s AA sponsor, in contact solely by phone from an unlisted number. Kilroy means to humanize the absurdity of the global boom (and bust) without dwelling too much on its technicalities, which is to the book's credit; Tristram’s devilish supporter gives the story a touch of black humor and underscores the way small human foibles can result in multimillion-euro catastrophes. Even so, the book feels constrained, like a black-box play with just a handful of props, partly due to the story’s framing as Tristram’s court testimony 10 years after the fact. Moreover, Kilroy’s tight focus on Tristram, his alcoholism and his efforts to restrain Hickey’s greed (an addiction in its own right) make a potentially big story feel small, while some subplots are underdeveloped, particularly one in which Tristram pursues an affair.
Kilroy deftly characterizes the absurdity of a land grab, though within a curiously limited range of characters.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2237-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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