Although the book falls short of fulfilling its potential, Hearth delivers a mildly amusing story featuring a wealth of...
Hearth’s cast of quirky small-town Southern misfits returns to tackle new challenges in this sequel to her debut novel (Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women’s Literary Society, 2012).
Literary Society member Eudora “Dora” Welty Witherspoon has been living in Jackson, Missississippi, for several months, researching her family’s history, when she receives a telegram summoning her home to Naples, Florida. Returning posthaste, she learns her ex-husband, Darryl Norwood, is developing a housing estate that threatens to disturb the ecosystem and displace a number of residents, including former stripper-turned-alligator hunter Dolores Simpson. Dora tries to reason with Darryl but fails to make headway, so her old book club friends rush to her aid. Transplanted Bostonian Jackie Hart, known among Neapolitans as Miss Dreamsville, is outraged that Darryl has usurped her moniker and dubbed the development Dreamsville Estates. She airs her displeasure in a column for the local newspaper and reminds citizens that the ghost of a Native American who was killed by European settlers allegedly haunts the disputed land. Jackie’s editorial wins over some readers, but her words don’t stop Darryl. Amid moments of soul-searching and surprising revelations, the friends coordinate an alternate plan to save the property. As they take action, Dora contemplates information she uncovers about her family; Dolores reflects upon past decisions and longs for the return of her son, who’s living in New York City; and, acutely aware that they’re defying convention, two more book club members care for another’s infant while she attends college in a distant city. Hearth’s sound writing and wit create a pleasant diversion despite superficial attempts to introduce subject matter relevant to Southern society in the '60s and beyond. Her inclusion of topics ranging from racial injustice and single parenthood to economic development vs. environmental protection might have enriched the narrative and propelled it to the next level, but, sadly, these themes are never wholly integrated into the plot.
Although the book falls short of fulfilling its potential, Hearth delivers a mildly amusing story featuring a wealth of eccentric characters.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6574-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
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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