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HUNTING PARTY

This slim novel engages but doesn’t surprise.

A talking rabbit, a hunting party, and an apocalyptic storm descend on the French countryside.

Any novel with talking animals—any novel for adults, anyway—is immediately suspect. Desarthe’s (Chez Moi, 2008) latest does feature a talking rabbit, but the result isn’t as tacky as you might think. Tristan is a yielding, nonconfrontational (human) transplant to the French countryside. When his unyielding wife urges him to join the ultramacho village men on a hunting trip, he acquiesces—but he doesn’t mean to kill anything. When he shoots a rabbit, he does so by mistake and scoops the injured-but-still-living body into his game bag with the hope of protecting it. Tristan and the rabbit go on to engage in a conversation the rest of the hunting party is apparently unable to hear (“Don’t die,” Tristan thinks; “I’m not dying,” the rabbit replies). But then Dumestre, the leader of their little hunting circle, falls into a deep hole, unable to climb out; two of the men go for help, while Tristan (and the rabbit) wait with him. As if that weren’t enough, it soon starts to rain—a heavy, apparently apocalyptic rain. And if that wasn’t enough, flashbacks from Tristan’s sad childhood intersperse with the action. Desarthe’s prose is elegant and clear, and, like other recent French authors, she’s interested in larger existential questions: what it means to be a man, to be human, to live a courageous life. But still: Why the talking rabbit? It’s not clear. It’s not clear, either, what the novel adds up to in the end, not even when the entirely unsurprising secret between Dumestre and Tristan’s wife is revealed.

This slim novel engages but doesn’t surprise.

Pub Date: July 17, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-944700-71-3

Page Count: 175

Publisher: Unnamed Press

Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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THE ROAD

A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.

Awards & Accolades

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  • National Book Critics Circle Finalist


  • Pulitzer Prize Winner

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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