Technical accomplishment that’s matched by a generosity of spirit.
Eight deliciously accessible stories follow the author’s first novel (The 25th Hour, 2001) and his screenplay for Troy.
All of these will hook you fast, and they’ll keep you hooked, with the possible exception of “De Composition,” a run-of-the-mill post-apocalyptic sketch. One story, “The Devil Comes to Orekovo,” is thrillingly good. An 18-year-old soldier, Leksi, is on patrol with two hardened veterans. They order him to kill a defenseless old woman suspected of funding terrorists, though Leksi has never killed anybody. The soldiers are Russian and the woman is Chechen, but this study of war’s brutal choices transcends time and place; the denouement has the satisfying inevitability of a work of art. Not quite in that league, but impressive nonetheless, is the title story, where Tabachnik, a talent scout for a major West Coast label, has his eyes on a singer with a punk-rock band playing New York. Moving cautiously, he detaches her from a poorly written contract and from her boyfriend, SadJoe, who stages a futile protest on the Los Angeles sidewalks. In the battle between blue-collar solidarity and really big bucks, old loyalties don’t stand a chance. Show-biz opportunity comes knocking again in the slighter but well-crafted “Garden of No” as actress/waitress June gets her big break and, hating herself, flees from boyfriend Sam, the short-order cook. Benioff further demonstrates his range in “Barefoot Girl in Clover” (a former high school football star who goes searching for the lost love of his youth gets whipsawed by the past), “Merde for Luck” (two gay men struggle to stave off AIDS), and the barbed whimsy of “Zoanthropy,” in which lions roam Manhattan and a humble museum guard claims he’s The Lover of the East Coast. The big city nurtures tall tales, a point made again in “Neversink,” in which a young woman lures suitors by inventing a father who was, supposedly, a ferocious ex-biker and pal of Sinatra’s.
Technical accomplishment that’s matched by a generosity of spirit.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03339-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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