This book leaves us to wonder about both the authority of the project and also its intention—whether or to what extent, in...
Doctorow wrote some powerful short stories, but it's not clear why they need to be collected again.
There’s something unsettling about collecting, once more, the short fiction of Doctorow, who died in 2015 at age 84. Partly it’s that he remains best known for his novels: The Book of Daniel (1971), Ragtime (1975), Billy Bathgate (1989). (Indeed, Doctorow published only 18 stories, parceled out over three collections, in a career spanning more than half a century.) But even more, it’s that his new book overlaps almost entirely with All the Time in the World, the new and selected stories he put out in 2011. Each of the 12 efforts there appears here as well, along with three others, drawn from Lives of the Poets (1984) and Sweet Land Stories (2004). This is not to criticize his writing, which is often sharp and resonant, just to suggest there is little point in gathering it again. Doctorow’s strength as a short story writer was similar to his strength as a novelist: an acute eye, an attention to detail, an understanding of both the promise and the limitations of narrative. “I thought how stupid, and imperceptive, and self-centered I had been,” the young narrator of “The Writer in the Family” admits, “never to have understood while he was alive what my father’s dream for his life had been.” A similar sensibility marks the magnificent “Wakefield,” inspired by the Hawthorne story of the same name, in which a successful attorney leaves his family and spends months hiding in the attic above his garage. What such stories have in common is a sense of displacement, what Doctorow once described as “dereliction”: a posture of drift or irresolution, as if the very act of living had become too much. Nonetheless, how can this not be undercut by gathering the same pieces yet again, as if they were less literature than monument? This might not be so problematic had the book included all of his short fiction, but three stories from Lives of the Poets, including the title novella, which is among the finest of his shorter works, did not make the cut.
This book leaves us to wonder about both the authority of the project and also its intention—whether or to what extent, in other words, the author’s legacy is being served.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 9780399588358
Page Count: 321
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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