The newest installment in Harington’s ongoing chronicle of the Arkansas Ozark community of Stay More (The Choiring of the Trees, 1991, etc.). This is a world that Mark Twain, or perhaps Booth Tarkington, would have recognized: an insular and embracing small town, despite the conflicts that define it at the time this novel’s events occur. World War II is underway, and as Harington’s preadolescent narrator “Dawny” (who, not quite believably, produces his own version of a daily newspaper) reports, the younger “Stay Morons” have divided themselves up into gangs labeled Allies, Axis, and Japs (“all for the sake of contests, baseball, war games, the play by which we find ourselves in the process of finding each other”). A lot happens in these alternately relaxed and overheated pages: the youngsters’ (all too representative) efforts to organize a town government and elect a “mare” (mayor) fall apart under their inability to bury their differences; local fathers and sons go off to war never to return home; a harmless mule is beaten to death, and a disrespected schoolteacher shows the stuff she’s made of (a very Twain-like episode); and in the novel’s culminating series of actions, a group of soldiers preparing for an invasion of Japan is billeted in the nearby hill country, Dawny finds and loses his first love, and a shocking act of violence shakes the sleepy Stay Morons painfully awake. Some of this is charming (Harington is at his best when contriving tall tales about mosquitoes who “outwit” those newfangled inventions called window screens); unfortunately, much more of it feels forced and miscalculated (Dawny is a little too bright and perceptive to be believed; and the melodramatic momentum of the closing pages undoes the careful pacing that produces many of Harington’s best effects, and furthermore seems to have come out of another novel entirely). Stay More remains an intermittently pleasant place to visit, but it never seems fully real, and you can’t imagine yourself, or anyone else, actually living there.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1998
ISBN: 1-887178-07-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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
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
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