One finds oneself virtually under an indefinable compulsion to keep reading once caught in the mesh of sheer story telling as Ayn Rand weaves the strands of her fantasy. With one part of reason, one tries to reject the grim horror of the portrait she draws of the final bastion of the once free world falling into a new sort of Dark Ages. The sins of the power magnates are taking their toll. In terror over the threat to their security contained in the ruthless drive of a few leaders of industry, they sell out their initiative, their imagination, their creative powers, their right to independence of thought and action to government, in exchange for imagined security of regulation and strangulation. The thinkers, the creators, the doers, the free spirits fade out of the picture; those who remain label them deserters and traitors. But a few of them, under the leadership of the freest spirits, lay the groundwork for a new social order. Their philosophy has much that will shock the conventional; their oath — "...I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine" — seems to contain a negation of the code of humanity. There seems a warped sort of approach to a materialistic touchstone. The insistence on the godlike quality of the leader is never quite carried out in the characterization. In fact, for this reader, most of the characters are unconvincing, overdrawn to represent symbols rather than people. This- for me- was true of The Fountainhead some 14 years ago. Then, too, the machinery of the story was compelling, fascinating; the philosophic content had something faintly phoney; the characters were two dimensional.... Atlas Shrugged holds a terrifying immediacy, if one can envision today's prosperity holding the seeds of tomorrow's decadence. Except in the isolated cases of unrealized potentials of invention, she has tapped few of the now-evident clues to our immediate mechanical future. One finds it difficult to gauge the time span here. The market? Curiosity will be high pressured by the promotion and publicity:- an unheard of advance to the author; a tremendous advertising appropriation; a spirited bidding for subsidiary rights; a predicted advance sale of 60,000 copies out of an initial 75,000 printing... The sheer size of the book — about 1150 pages — is a magnet for an astounding number of readers.... The story is a challenging one; the manner of the telling holds reader interest, despite the unnecessary length; there's enough of sex to provide its mead of shockers; and there is the odd allure of fantasy, a sort of science fiction appeal. And one can count, too, on a goodly number who will discuss the social philosophy with heated arguments, pro and con — plus the intellectual snob appeal of those who like to feel they've plumbed a new code of ethics. It is not a book that leaves one unscathed.
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1957
ISBN: 0452011876
Page Count: 1168
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1957
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
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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