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THE MULTICULTIBOHO SIDESHOW

Name: THE MULTICULTIBOHO SIDESHOW
Author: Alexs D. Pate
ISBN: 0-380-97678-1

by Alexs D. Pate ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1999

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Pate’s fourth (Finding Makeba, 1997, etc.) is indeed a multicultural sideshow headlined by a struggling African-American writer who attempts to explain the death of a white, grant-giving benefactor to a cop. One morning Ichabod “Icky” Word, an unpublished novelist eking out a living in Minneapolis, calls the police to his apartment. When Lt. Bill Bloom arrives alone, Word disarms him, ties him to a chair, and gags him before launching into a book- long explanation of the dead body in the corner of his apartment. The body is that of Dewitt McMichael, a white officer of the Shrubbery Foundation and a self-styled benefactor of underrepresented art, who recently assembled a group of “minority” artists to inform them they were finalists for a half-million-dollar grant. Word had hosted a reception in his apartment for the contestants, and McMichael had joined them. During a particularly heated exchange about white underwriting of minority artists—and all the assumptions behind it—McMichael, maintains Word, died from a ruptured blood vessel, perhaps a stroke. On this spare frame of plot, Pate takes ample opportunity to embroider stereotypes, sexual prejudices, economic biases, police harassment, and the travails of Word’s life in largely white Minneapolis. The fatal exchange, Word reports, involved McMichael’s final confession: “The work you are doing just doesn—t take me anywhere.” Do the issues here sound too complex? Pate obligingly suggests that McMichael is doing this work to assuage the guilt he’s felt, ever since boyhood, when he ran over his pet dog The author’s essayistic subject—the cultural depiction of people who make artistic representations of themselves—overshadows his narrative. As with many book-length sermons, though, there are still some piquant and useful exhibits here.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-380-97678-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
WEST OF REHOBOTH
by Alexs D. Pate

- BOOK REVIEW
FINDING MAKEBA
by Alexs D. Pate

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GOLDFINCH
by Donna Tartt

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE FRIEND
by Donna Tartt

- SEEN & HEARD
Podcast Will Explore Bennington College Lit Trio

- SEEN & HEARD
‘The Secret History’ Is New ‘Today’ Book Club Pick

- SEEN & HEARD
Jenna Bush Hager Launching Author Podcast

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.