Painfully honest, compassionately cognizant of human frailty and complexity, alive to the magic of creativity yet aware of...
Mansbach (Angry Black White Boy, 2004, etc.) searchingly examines the fraught relations between Jews and gentiles, blacks and whites, men and women, artists and those who nurture them.
The bravura opening set piece catches Tristan Brodsky racing through his East Bronx neighborhood in 1935. “Fifteen years old, the sum total of five thousand years of Jewry, one week into City College, a mind on him like a diamond cutter,” Tristan is an aspiring writer desperate to break free from his immigrant parents’ narrow expectations. A half-century later in Prague, teenage photographer Nina Hricek similarly burns to escape stifling communist Czechoslovakia, maybe even find the father who fled for the States five years earlier and hasn’t been heard from since. The third chapter introduces Tristan’s grandson, Tris Freedman, or RISK, as he prefers to be known in 1989, when the suburban teen spray-paints his tag on freight trains in between gigs playing hip-hop music at Connecticut bar mitzvahs. In one of the novel’s many smart, socially revealing scenes, RISK takes Grandpa—a famous novelist who’s having a bad bout of writer’s block—out to the yards with some cans of Red Devil. Rejuvenated by his contact with a new kind of culture, Tristan begins a novel that, when it’s published in 1997, completely overshadows his embittered grandson’s fiction debut. A raft of full-bodied characters helps Mansbach maintain equal interest in the separate plot lines until Nina eventually meets Tris, but the central, tragic story concerns the slow disintegration of Tristan’s marriage to Amalia, a gifted poet whose initial connection with Tristan as a fellow writer is so electric that it takes her 50 years to finally rebel against his cold, punishing ways and dedication to his work at the expense of his family. The moving, chilling final scenes suggest that Tris is the same sort of unapologetically egotistical artist.
Painfully honest, compassionately cognizant of human frailty and complexity, alive to the magic of creativity yet aware of its consequences—very exciting fiction indeed.Pub Date: March 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52044-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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