Archive for the ‘New York City’ Category

THE COLOR OF NIGHT by Madison Smartt Bell

I have chosen this rather longer quotation to show how Madison Smartt Bell can turn on a dime between a realistic description of a California druggie cult in the late sixties to an evocation of the revels of Dionysian maenads from the earliest age of Greek mythology. The link here is an acid trip, but Bell does not need chemicals to effect his alchemy. In 2001, when the book opens, the narrator Mae is a middle-aged croupier in a Las Vegas area casino. Bell’s description is realistic and immediate: “Only the whirl of lights and the electronic burbling of machines, rattle of dice in the craps table cups, and almost inaudible whisper of cards, the friction-free hum of roulette wheels turning.” But two sentences later, he has already made the shift: “It was a sort of fifth-rate hell, and I a minor demon posted to it. A succubus too indifferent to suck.”

April 6, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, California, Contemporary, New York City, US Southwest, y Award Winning Author

WHEN THE THRILL IS GONE by Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley has created a private eye with a unique take on the world in Leonid McGill, son of Tolstoy McGill and brother to Nikita. Leonid’s Father was a communist activist, a man for the worker, with a philosopher’s tongue. When the Thrill is Gone opens with Leonid having been estranged from his father for many years. However, Leonid often refers to his father’s adages to get him through life. And, like Dr. House, Leonid believes that everybody lies. “Almost everything you know or ever hear is a lie. Advertisements, politicians’ promises, children’s claims of accomplishments and innocence…your own memory.”

March 9, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: Character Driven, Class - Race - Gender, Mystery/Suspense, New York City, Sleuths Series, y Award Winning Author

THE INTIMATES by Ralph Sassone

Robbie and Maize, the principal characters in Ralph Sassone’s immensely readable debut novel, THE INTIMATES, totally fit the profile of these restless and searching young adults. As the book opens, the two are still in high school; Maize nurses a crush on her guidance counselor and when Robbie’s path crosses hers, it doesn’t immediately amount to much. Robbie is gay—a fact he doesn’t realize until much later in high school.

February 21, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Character Driven, Contemporary, Debut Novel, New York City

OPEN CITY by Teju Cole

When Julius, a young psychiatrist living in New York, looks out of his apartment window, he loves to watch the birds fly past. And when he occasionally spots geese flying in formation, he wonders how our life below would look like to them. This same external perspective—which one could argue immigrants master especially well—permeates Teju Cole’s debut novel, OPEN CITY.

February 8, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Debut Novel, Literary, New York City

DEATH INSTINCT by Jed Rubenfeld

In Jed Rubenfeld’s sexy, moody, Hitchcockian-cum-Freudian-cum-Jungian literary novel, THE INTERPRETION OF MURDER, Dr. Stratham Younger narrates a story within the framework of a fictional journal, focusing on his experiences with Drs. Jung and Freud on their revolutionary visit to the United States in 1909. Rubenfeld braided historical fact and fiction in this Manhattan corkscrew murder mystery, centering on Freud’s pioneering “talking therapy” and penning some biting dialogue between the three psychoanalysts. Younger’s skepticism and attraction to Freud’s theories enhanced the mesmerizing story of his attempt to cure a damaged, neurotic, and mute woman. The novel was peopled with a sprawling cast of doctors and louche politicians, drawing the reader into a lush, dissecting mixture of cerebral scrutiny and emotional desire.

Rubenfeld’s second and very ambitious novel also weaves fact and fiction, with extensive scope, while adopting some of the motifs and themes from his debut work. This time the author is tacitly paralleling events in the novel to the economic depression of contemporary times, as well as the 9/11 tragedies.

January 21, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Facing History, Mystery/Suspense, New York City

THE GORDIAN KNOT by Bernhard Schlink

Just now and again in this novel, as in the quotation above, one gets a glimpse of Bernhard Schlink the moral philosopher who probed so deeply into the German past with his novels THE READER and HOMECOMING and especially the non-fiction GUILT ABOUT THE PAST. But readers looking to this novel for deeper insights will be disappointed. Although the publishers do nothing whatever to indicate that this is not a new novel, its references to Francs and Deutschmarks, to East Germany as a separate country, and to the still-standing World Trade Center show that the book is not of our time. It is in fact a translation of a comparatively early novel by the German author-jurist, first published in 1988. This matters little to readers willing to accept the book on its own terms, but will disappoint those expecting to follow the recent development of Schlink’s sophisticated thought.

January 14, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: France, New York City, Noir, Thriller/Spy/Caper