By turns creepy and thought-provoking, this is a resonant debut about love, independence, and mourning.
When terror about the future intersects with the anticipated death of a loved one, many people act out in previously unimaginable ways.
For 30-something only child Denny, finding out that her father has been diagnosed with cancer for the third time sends her into a complete meltdown. This is compounded by the fact that he has decided to forego treatment—no chemo, no radiation, just in-home hospice care. When Denny learns this, she unravels, but she does so without tears, pleadings, or prayer. Instead, the unwelcome news leads her to sabotage her job at a laboratory, and, after getting fired, she decides to vanish, telling no one where she is headed. Her new home, a remote cabin on a distant mountaintop, lacks electricity and is heated only by a wood fireplace. There are no nearby neighbors or stores, and she must bring enough food with her to last for the duration of her stay—projected at a year. To say that this is a challenge for someone who has never lived outside the Washington, D.C., suburbs is an understatement. Nonetheless, Denny wants this, badly. Or thinks she does. At times, Gene, an imaginary friend she has had since age 14, pops up and offers quips, advice, or opinions. Then he, too, vanishes, and despite Denny’s purported desire for solitude, after a horrible storm destroys the cabin’s roof, she is both relieved and frightened to find a mysterious man named Haw in her front yard. Haw is simultaneously menacing and appealing, and it doesn't take long for Denny to become entangled with him. Suffice it to say that the love-hate relationship that unfolds is not for the faint of heart. There’s violence and cruelty, all of it matter-of-factly described, with Denny betraying little-to-no emotion about the circumstances she faces.
By turns creepy and thought-provoking, this is a resonant debut about love, independence, and mourning.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-242-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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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