A bridge work that will hopefully lead to McBride’s next major novel.
The third novel from the unique Irish author.
After her dazzling debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2014)—winner of the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, among others—McBride took a slight step back in The Lesser Bohemians (though that book did win the 2016 James Tait Black Memorial Prize). In her latest, a slim book that could be considered a novella, the author yet again dives relentlessly into the interior of her unnamed protagonist, narrating her travels to anonymous hotels in Avignon, France, Prague, Oslo, Auckland, and Austin. In each locale, she drinks wine, smokes cigarettes, and engages in one-night stands and lengthy bouts of what she admits is “existential overindulgence,” desperately seeking to avoid any further thoughts of an unnamed trauma that she suffered in the past (likely the loss of the father of her child, referenced only obliquely at moments throughout the book). The narrative is focused almost entirely inward, structured like a lengthy interior monologue or self-negotiation that often grows claustrophobic. Consistently, the protagonist reverts to her “preferred manner in which to proceed. Thinking her way carefully around every instant. Grammatically and logically constructing it….Lining words up against words, then clause against clause until an agreeable distance has been reached from the initial, unmanageable impulse which first set them all in train.” It’s clear that the woman has endured significant emotional and spiritual pain. However, in relating her thoughts, she may be “relentlessly reshuffling the deck of pseudo-intellectual garble which...serves the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence.” As in McBride's previous books, there are numerous sparks of singularly brilliant prose—e.g., “Outside the sky’s a horror of fight and bruise. Velour black, pumped with racket, gored by orange.” Ultimately, though, as the protagonist herself acknowledges, “the time for this digression is up. She should really be getting off this subject.” Readers will agree at many points in her story.
A bridge work that will hopefully lead to McBride’s next major novel.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-27062-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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