July 31, 1995
Danny O'Hara is exuberant, generous, ambitious--and the grandson of the recently deceased Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Henry Chafee is quiet and deliberate, from a pleasant but undistinguished family. The two, former roommates at Yale, are sharing a foxhole on the Arno line in WWII when Henry turns coward and Danny saves his life. So begins this latest novel from Buckley (A Very Private Plot), who won the American Book Award for Stained Glass (1978) but is unlikely to duplicate that feat with this predictable, if glitzy, offering. Long flashbacks fill in the past up to the Arno incident; through these and subsequent passages, it becomes clear that Danny will manipulate people and events whenever he can turn them to his advantage. In adulthood, this blueblood becomes a crooked hotelier and worse, while Henry makes his mark as a journalist, especially during the Vietnam War. Eventually, Henry gets the goods on Danny and must make a difficult decision. Numerous cameos by the real-life rich and powerful enliven the proceedings (Georges Simenon plays a vital role); underneath all the provocative names and places, however, this is just a potboiler, deftly stirred but no match for Buckley's best. Major ad/promo; author tour.
May 1, 1995
Buckley's newest gripper begins in World War II, when a young man covers for a friend whose courage failed him at the last moment, and ends in acrimony years later.
July 1, 1995
Departing from the Blackford Oakes espionage series, Buckley introduces his following to a buddy theme. Supposedly, Danny O'Hara and Henry Chaffee are locked together for life by a shameful secret: Henry's cowardice in the face of German fire. But aside from some barbed conversational allusions over the ensuing two decades, the episode exerts minimal force on the pair. Instead their fates derive from the charming Danny boy's fleshy hedonism and greed. Motivated by those two beliefs, he commits the deadly sins that bring him down, while Henry leads a largely staid life as a rising reporter who makes his career covering Vietnam. Danny runs a hotel chain, in whose till he is in up to his elbows; when discovered, thief and victim conceal the scandal. Unluckily for the cover-uppers, a tenacious researcher digs out the dirt, and Danny's solution, murder, catches up with him on the Riviera. En route, he encounters--deus ex machina!--old army pal Henry, traveling to interview Georges Simenon, the French mystery writer. Henry realizes that one Simenon story was inspired by a crime issuing from his and Danny's long-ago battering of a blackmailer, only Danny had never confided to going beyond bludgeoning. Confronted with the facts, Henry forces Danny to take the military way out (bottle and revolver), a tidy closing for companionable Buckley fans. But due to assorted handicaps, like passages on Danny's marriage that develop little beyond Danny's caddish character, this novel is not likely to induce non-B boosters to augment the club. ((Reviewed July 1995))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1995, American Library Association.)
October 2, 1996
Buckley's latest novel mixes fact and fiction in a meditation on courage and morality.