Children have often figured prominently in Beattie's fiction, though they have seldom been as young as Will, the five-year-old object of inquiry of her first novel since Love Always (1985): it's a kind of contemporary version of James' What Maisie Knew in which Beattie—with mixed results—places Will in a tangle of divorced parents and their new spouses and lovers and patrons. Though the primary emphasis here is on the mother, Jody, and the father, Wayne, italicized linking passages—little essays on childhood—underscore Will's central position in the triptych. Jody and Wayne divorced some time ago, after Wayne walked. Mother and son now live in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Jody works as a wedding photographer; her "secret work"—her own photographs—have become so good that devoted lover Mel is arranging her first show with Haveabud, an epicene conniver and New York gallery-owner. As Jody breaks into the big time, so Mel gives his all to raising Will. He drives him to Florida to visit Wayne; en route, Will has his first intimation of evil when he catches Haveabud fooling around with another small boy in a motel bathroom. Good-looking, promiscuous Wayne turns out to be a major-league flake; he is already thinking of leaving his third wife, Corky, a good-hearted soul who wishes she were Will's mother. While the childless Corky and Mel demonstrate their fine nurturing qualities, Wayne and Jody fail Will shockingly—Wayne by causing a chickens-coming-home-to-roost scene in which Will must see his father led away in handcuffs, Jody by refusing to listen to Will's revelations about her "manic mentor" Haveabud. The familiar Beattie world of dislocations, where "love is like a feather in the breeze," is rendered awkwardly here. The scenes of Haveabud's pederasty and Wayne's arrest seem forced and arbitrary; the childhood essays are irritatingly portentous; and it's not until Florida that Beattie hits her stride. Still, her quirky humor and her dialogue, wickedly good, just about make the trip worthwhile.
Pub Date: Jan. 29, 1989
ISBN: 0679731946
Page Count: -
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1989
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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