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YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE

An immature, unfocused story about a young man who’s much the same.

A suburban boy tries to make the leap to manhood and fails miserably.

One might expect a little evolution from this sophomore novel by Dolnick (Zoology, 2007). Unfortunately, the author rolls out the same humdrum anxiety and juvenile yearning that characterized his debut novel. Worse, this new story has an even more generic setting and a plethora of tired, clichéd plot points that make it a drag to complete. The neighborhood boy of the moment is Jacob Vine, a middle child struggling with identity and family in the cheerlessness of his Maryland township. His biggest struggle is his ongoing hatred of older brother Will, a smart and popular student who drowns Jacob in his shadow. Barely given pause is the cancer fight faced by Jacob’s mother, and the terrible anguish of his ghostly father. Mostly, this parental absence seems to be an excuse for the endlessly navel-gazing Jacob to chat up Emily, the girl on which he dotes. “Over already,” Dolnick writes of the funeral. “Songs, stories, death like a dimmer switch in the sky.” While Jacob is terribly self-involved, Emily is a poorly drawn cipher, flip-flopping between cold aloofness and teenage lust with abandon. She’s painted with that patina of desire that only pubescent boys can muster, but a lack of distinguishable character washes her out. The book follows their relationship, which ends with a hackneyed and regrettably ordinary plot device. But Dolnick clearly isn’t afraid to trot out plenty of other chestnuts. From teen pregnancy to sibling rivalry, academic disappointment to first heartbreak, the novel’s touchstones are all too familiar. In fact, they’re so very unexceptional that the novel doesn’t give readers any purchase on which to hang affection or even sympathy for the coddled boy at the center of the story. At one point, Jacob has a mild revelation about the interconnectivity of his life’s events, but it’s lost as quickly as it arrives.

An immature, unfocused story about a young man who’s much the same.

Pub Date: March 15, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-307-39087-5

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Vintage

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010

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CONCLAVE

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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