This publication is an important event: Welcome back, Don Carpenter.
Do we need another work about the struggles of writers? Sure, we do—if it has the warmth and charm and sexy vibe of Carpenter’s (From a Distant Place, 1988, etc.) novel.
This recently discovered, not-quite-final draft has been lovingly shaped for publication by author Jonathan Lethem. Carpenter (1932–1995), author of 10 novels, was a veteran of the West Coast literary scene. He offers us four young writers—four separate struggles. Take Jaime Froward, a 19-year-old native of San Francisco. In 1959, she’s studying at the state university, where she meets Charlie Monel, 10 years her senior. Charlie is a Korean War vet and former POW working on a big war novel. At Jaime’s urging, they jump into bed. After she gets pregnant, bighearted Charlie insists they marry. Perfect timing, since Jaime’s father has just died in his mistress's bed, and her mother, drunk and disoriented, is selling their home. Meanwhile, up in Portland, Ore., young Dick Dubonet is the toast of the town. He has sold a story to Playboy and scores again when he hooks up with Linda McNeill, a voluptuous free spirit who has hung out with the Beats. Charlie, along with Jaime and their baby daughter, moves to Portland to teach at a community college (his novel is proving intractable). One of his students is Stan Winger, a jewel thief. Stan writes really good drugstore pulps and will soon start selling them. As for Jaime, she throws herself into a novel based on her family. It devastates Charlie; his wife is the far better writer. However, as Carpenter makes clear, Stan and Jaime are equals in the republic of letters, though working in very different genres. Doing time at San Quentin, Stan shows heroic discipline, memorizing whole chapters of his new project. Both Stan and Charlie gravitate to Hollywood, which Carpenter treats with surprising generosity as he takes his story up to 1975, when the future still beckons invitingly.
This publication is an important event: Welcome back, Don Carpenter.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-301-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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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