Tedious, prolix tales: Unsympathetic characters may have become a staple of the self-consciously iconoclastic story. But...
Brightened sometimes by compassion or deft psychological insight, this collection mainly induces headaches brought on by convoluted, show-off prose and plotless ambivalence. Hurlyburly playwright Rabe would do better to stick to penning plays.
Recalling slightly the noir lyricism of Hemingway’s “The Killers,” the story “Some Loose Change” finds boozy losers Red and Macky seeking revenge on a real-estate bigwig who’s reneged on a debt. There’s mood aplenty in this lean tale: cut-rate strip clubs, busted Fords, Vietnam vet paranoia and the kind of dialogue that’s generally categorized as “taut.” And there’s real poignancy in “Holy Men,” wherein a young writer and lapsed Catholic returns home to visit his priest and mentor. In college, he’d tried out mildly experimental work; the good father encouraged it, provoking the ire of his order’s superiors. After suffering a nervous breakdown, he’d been banished from teaching and exiled to ecclesiastical Siberia, ministering to aging nuns. And the writer blamed himself for the priest’s collapse. While he can’t resist the reference to the Inquisition that’s obligatory in angry ex-Catholic fiction, Rabe carefully renders the provisional reconciliation of teacher and student, a moment of genuine grace. But even the best of his stories seem written as though someone had misread a thesaurus. “Guilt brought on a threatening regression whose only counteraction was to escalate the severity and terms of my quarantine” isn’t atypical of his tortuous style. The title story meanders through upper-middle-class malaise to a wishy-washy conclusion; “Early Madonna” goes on and on about a girl’s fixation on the pop star; “Veranda” deals with a neglectful dad and attempts to be heartbreaking, but manages mainly to annoy.
Tedious, prolix tales: Unsympathetic characters may have become a staple of the self-consciously iconoclastic story. But they sure are hard to take.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1807-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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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