A tease tricked out with literary effects.
Build cage. Buy gun. Kidnap editor. But then what? Hayes (stories: Kissing You, 2003) fumbles the hard part in his talky first novel.
The abduction is over, disappointingly, in a New York minute. After Evan Ulmer nabs senior book publishing editor Bob Partnow outside his Manhattan office, the obliging editor drives the getaway car to Evan’s home in Sandhurst, a quiet Hudson Valley town. Once there, Evan imprisons Bob in his soundproofed basement, a chain-link fence separating them. Evan, 35, was a legal proofreader until his parents’ deaths made him financially independent, and has written two unpublished novels. What’s behind his harebrained scheme? Is it a loser’s muddled concoction of envy and revenge, or does he just want a pal? For there will be long, inconclusive talks between the guys. Meanwhile, Evan has met a potential girlfriend at the library, the much younger Promise Buckley, also an aspiring writer. Hayes crosscuts between Evan’s conversations with Bob and with Promise; we never get more than snippets of each. Two might have been company, if Evan and Bob had probed their psyches instead of sniffing each other, but three feels like a crowd. Nor does Hayes try for the sense of menace that, say, Fowles achieved in The Collector. Bob tells Evan (a wimp, despite the gun) that he’s not afraid of him, and Evan confides to the reader that Bob’s release is a “foregone conclusion.” But neither does Hayes attempt black comedy, despite Bob’s flashes of dry humor. What’s left is a novel of character, though we don’t get much of that either. Promise is underdeveloped. Low-keyed Bob comes off better, a jaded professional with an unusual love life—certainly more interesting than Evan, an empty vessel whose essential passivity casts doubt on his kidnapping credentials. The only thing that works is the denouement, which engages all three characters in satisfying, credible ways.
A tease tricked out with literary effects.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-55597-409-0
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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