A warmly rendered collection.
A cast of eccentrics and outsiders populates a collection set largely in coastal Ireland.
In “You Can’t Call It That,” the final story in Hopkin’s (The Living Legend of St. Patrick, 1989, etc.) slim volume, the unnamed narrator says, “I believe the truth is made clearer if one tells lies. Even though you shouldn’t call fiction that. You can’t call it that. I believe in stories. I love stories.” Featuring a freelance journalist who shares all the same credentials as the author, this story—like most in the collection—walks the line between short fiction and essay. Or as Hopkin might put it, the line between truth and lies. In “Strangers,” a photographer on a remote island takes pictures of a young girl who seems more than just a little odd. In “An Explanation of the Tides,” a group of locals in a fishing village watches town drama unfold from the confines of the only pub. The title story features two travelers who meet in the Aran Islands and strike up an unlikely friendship. These are mostly quiet stories about mostly quiet places, offering us slice-of-life glimpses into sharply wrought settings. But Hopkin knows enough not to stay in the same pitch for each story, and some of her strongest writing here comes when she departs from the more journalistic offerings. In “New Girl,” a young girl at boarding school who only wants to be left alone to read earns the admiration of her peers in a surprising way. “Twentyquidsworth” is an homage to British and Irish ghost stories in the tradition of M.R. James. But whichever mode Hopkin chooses, her eye remains keen and her affection for her settings and characters evident.
A warmly rendered collection.Pub Date: April 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-94315-008-3
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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