Funny, deft, and sharply told, Proulx’s latest (after Close Range, 1999) suffers from excessive local color in parts, but...
A kind of Rake’s Progress set in the Texas panhandle, where a slick Denver hustler goes to fleece the rubes and ends up going over to their side.
The aptly named Bob Dollar hasn’t got much going for him except youth, innocence, and an uninformed ambition to make something of himself. It’s not surprising he turned out this way, considering that his no-good parents walked out when he was seven, leaving him in the care of his crusty uncle while they went off to seek their fortune in Alaska. Now that he’s all grown up and done with college, Bob takes a job with the Global Pork Rind Corporation as location scout. His mission is to scour the Texas panhandle looking for ranches that might be bought to use as hog farms for the GPR. It’s a tough sell (who wants to live near a hog farm?), and the Texas outback is rough territory for salesmen under the best of circumstances. For a young man in a hurry, though, the job offers hope of quick advancement and good money down the line. But Bob, a Denver boy, has never been to Texas before, and he doesn’t know the first thing about the ways of folks on the panhandle—where millionaires are likely to live in trailers and building steam locomotives in your garage might count as a normal hobby. In the little crossroads town of Woolybucket, with his landlady LaVon Fronk as his guide, he sets out to size up the locals and go in for the kill. He soon settles upon Ace and Tater Crouch as his best target: cash-poor and getting on in years, the Crouch brothers own a large spread that would be perfect for a hog farm. Unfortunately for Bob, the Crouches have more than dollars in mind. Even worse, they eventually make him see that there’s more than dollars in life.
Funny, deft, and sharply told, Proulx’s latest (after Close Range, 1999) suffers from excessive local color in parts, but it’s engaging and worthwhile—if not up to her usual level.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-684-81307-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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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