Cook’s sharply honed prose packs an intellectual yet disturbing wallop. Be forewarned: Reading too many of these stories in...
Cook, who has worked on the radio show This American Life, debuts with 12 mercilessly in-your-face stories.
Many exist in a parallel universe where nature and/or society has become a menacing force. A woman living in a prisonlike “shelter for widows and other unwanteds” narrates the only moderately horrifying opening story, “Moving On.” Her Placement Team finds her a new husband once she starts following their rules for erasing memories of her past. The second story, “The Way the End of Days Should Be,” plunges into an apocalyptic world where floodwaters rise unstoppably. No escape is possible in “It’s Coming,” either, though the menace here remains unnamed and therefore even more frightening. Both stories have victims/protagonists whose wealth and authority, not to mention careful preparations, prove useless. Water returns as a prime enemy, at least initially, in the title story about three men whose fishing vacation and friendships go horribly wrong when they can’t find the supposedly nearby lakeshore. People’s need for connection continually gets trampled. Dangerously needy crowds collect like moths around the flame of a young woman’s good fortune in “The Mast Year.” “Somebody’s Baby” and “Marrying Up” evince primal maternal fears. In the former, a man steals babies whenever mothers let their guards down; in the latter, a woman’s healthy baby and husband brutalize her. In “A Wanted Man,” about loneliness more than sex, a man who can impregnate 50 women in a day is reminiscent of a TV Western gunslinger—admired, envied and marked by those who want to replace him. The erotic nature of teen friendship reaches demented lengths in “Girl on Girl.” The strongest, relatively most realistic and hopeful story, “Meteorologist Dave Santana,” follows a sexually predatory woman who stalks her neighbor for years while lying to herself that all she cares about is the chase.
Cook’s sharply honed prose packs an intellectual yet disturbing wallop. Be forewarned: Reading too many of these stories in one sitting may cause suicidal thoughts.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-233310-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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