Fun, though, for Hemon fans who want to see him work in a different mode.
One of America’s finest authors of somber novels about alienation brings a newbie’s enthusiasm to a comic novel—about alienation, of course.
Since the war in his native Bosnia left him exiled in Chicago in 1992, Hemon (The Lazarus Project, 2008; Love and Obstacles, 2009, etc.) has used his fiction to ruminate on the expat experience in ways that, though not humorless, emphasize distance and disconnection. (His 2013 essay collection, The Book of My Lives, closes with a devastating essay on the death of his infant daughter.) This madcap detour centers on Joshua, a Chicago wannabe screenwriter who has a laptop stuffed with bad movie ideas, an ill-advised crush on Ana, a married Bosnian immigrant in the ESL class he teaches, and an ex-Marine landlord who’s overeager for swordplay. Hemon has a knack, it turns out, for raucous, Shteyngart-ian lines that highlight his hero’s absurdist despair. (“Oh Lord, don’t chasten me and make me a disposable character in your spec script!” he thinks.) Joshua’s ill-advised fling with Ana gets him tossed out of his girlfriend’s apartment, threatened by Ana’s husband, and generally despairing for his well-being, a feeling he sublimates into his script about post-apocalyptic zombie hordes. Hemon has arranged all the right pieces for a laugh-out-loud novel—chatty Jewish relatives, impossibly nerdy writers, immigrants with old-school and illegal notions about preserving loyalty. And zombies are a great theme for Hemon; what better symbol is there for an uncertain life than the undead? The novel lags on the level of characterization, though: Joshua is persistently passive and self-effacing, lost in his lame movie ideas. This is partly by design: “[N]either his will or his talent was ever strong enough,” as Hemon writes. But it reduces the thrust of the novel, whose great lines need a plot to match.
Fun, though, for Hemon fans who want to see him work in a different mode.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-20341-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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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