Billy Pilgrim, meet Billy Twillig—no Vonnegutian unstuck-in-time traveler, but another lugubrious pubescent hero beset by strange experiences having to do with extraterrestrial contact and space-time distortion. DeLillo's Billy is a fourteen-year-old, Bronx-bred mathematical genius, recipient of the Nobel Prize, who is summoned to a huge computer-radiotelescope complex called Space Brain to decode a cryptic message received from the vicinity of Ratner's Star. The author of Americana and End Zone has invented a futuristic, surrealistic research institute where the beauty and terror of pure science meets the absurdity of bureaucratic science and the paranoia of corporate applied science. Billy must dodge the attempts of a secret Honduran/Germanic cartel—led by Elux Troxl, who speaks Latinate garble, and Grbk, who smells like a foot and speaks Speedwriting—to wire his brain to Space Brain for purposes of profit. He must also elude the seductions of pneumatic female colleagues and the nameless perils of a knowledge which has driven one eminent colleague to live in a hole and eat worms, another into fits of narcolepsy. DeLillo's novel pirouettes madly at the new/ancient intersection of science and mysticism, simultaneously participating in and parodying our most modern discoveries: that we are as primitive as ever in the face of the expanded Unknown, and that all knowledge curves back boomerang-like on the self. It is a novel to be read, not for plot (rambling, obscure) nor for character (a thousand loony variations on the author), but for prose—DeLillo's enraptured aria to the twin kabala of mathematics and language, in arc after dazzling arc of words.
Pub Date: June 4, 1976
ISBN: 0679722920
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1976
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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