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CRUSTACEANS

Name: CRUSTACEANS
Author: Andrew Cowan
ISBN: 0-312-28310-5

by Andrew Cowan ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

Accomplished but deadening. Better would be Prozac and some therapy.

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One man’s litany of loss, told in a letter to a son already perished.

Paul has three losses to confront: his mother; his son Euan; and then Ruth, Euan’s mother. From the start, we know that all three are gone and that Paul is driving back to the seashore where they used to gather. Tension comes from flashbacks about Paul’s upbringing in a motherless family (how did she die? he is always asking), about his courtship with Ruth, and about how Euan came to be and then not to be. That the memory of Euan is all Paul has left seems intended as the emotion to keep us buoyant, but as a narrative device it’s not as strong as it needs to be: These clipped remembrances may be meant to create sadness, but too often they come off like the monotone of a math teacher delivering theorems. And the tone, too, is out of sync with the recounting of happy times: Would a young father, in a letter to a dead son, refer so often to his own sexual arousal, his erections, his fixations with Ruth’s breasts, all as though these were the saddest of things? By the time we know how everyone has died or vanished, the sorrow has become a drain and Paul has become a friend you can no longer comfort: he needs to snap out of it, maybe seek help. British author Cowan (Common Ground, 1997, etc.) tries to save him, but only early does the prose ring true for his character: “And when she visits today . . . she can take whatever else remains in the house, if that’s what she wants. She knows now where I’ve come. The patch is still here in my pocket, and I can’t give it away, can’t pass it on. It is all that is left to me, all I shall keep, and like the love it is useless.”

Accomplished but deadening. Better would be Prozac and some therapy.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-312-28310-5

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Picador

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
COMMON GROUND
by Andrew Cowan

- BOOK REVIEW
PIG
by Andrew Cowan

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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.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

- BOOK REVIEW
PRECIPICE
by Robert Harris

- BOOK REVIEW
ACT OF OBLIVION
by Robert Harris

- BOOK REVIEW
V2
by Robert Harris

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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.