by Carolyn Chute ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 2020
Messy, confrontational, way too long—and essential reading.
Third volume in Chute’s blistering series about the Settlement, a radical, politically incorrect collective of the disorderly and disaffected in rural Maine.
The Settlement revolves around "Prophet” Gordon St. Onge, who rails against corporations, the media, and the war machine; he also has 19 “wives,” even more guns, and a friendly relationship with several right-wing militias. However, although the novel takes place from 1990 to 2000, the election of Donald Trump has clearly prompted its author to do some thinking about her previous willingness to declare her characters “no-wing." Chute is at pains to have Gordon denounce “Republican bullshit” and “so-called Christians” to his militia buddies, and she’s backed off her previous contempt for middle-class progressives; Settlement residents form a relationship of wary mutual respect with a group of left-wing grassroots organizers. Nonetheless, Gordon’s and his author’s hearts are always with “the poor, meek, dishonored, deformed, disheartened, and displaced,” and Chute makes it brutally clear that until the left gets over its distaste for “redneck[s]” and poor whites who refuse to be manipulated by racists, the same people will keep running the world. (The sexual power of teenage girls is another third-rail topic she fearlessly tackles.) The action here runs parallel to events in The School on Heart’s Content Road (2008) and Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves (2014) but spotlights different people from her vast cast of characters. Fifteen-year-old Brianna Vandermast, newest of the wives, emerges as the leader of the Settlement’s younger generation; their end run around Gordon toward even more radical dissent drives what there is of a plot. A manifesto and a mass rally prompt increasingly menacing government harassment and a warning of more nefarious deeds to come from corporate CEO Bruce Hummer, his conscience apparently pricked by his rapidly growing cancers. A few juicy personal conflicts keep the novel from devolving entirely into a political tract—but then again, Chute’s fierce political vision has always been the most interesting thing about her work.
Messy, confrontational, way too long—and essential reading.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2951-2
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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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