A cerebral, contemplative story that looks inside relationships and what can hold us back.
Vondohlen’s debut novel features Dan, whose thoughtful, solitary ways have created a wedge in his relationships.
Dan is ruminating over the death of his father and the unraveling of his marriage as he makes a trip to Knoxville, Tenn., to hash things out with his brother, Roger. His brother had behaved flippantly at the funeral, and his misbehavior—taking phone calls, drinking in the limo, a shallow eulogy—caused a rift between the brothers. Dan, who has just moved out of his home in Houston and separated from his wife and 3-year-old daughter, enjoys simple pleasures: gardening, brewing his own beer, the soothing sounds of the soda plant where he works as an accountant, and whiskey—a hobby his wife disapproves of more and more. The trouble in Dan’s marriage—mostly related to his solitary nature and inaction—propels the story forward as he muses over his relationships and allows it to hold him back. He goes to Knoxville charged with asking his brother for a share of the inheritance, which he was mysteriously denied. Dan is intimidated by Roger’s grand house, his country club and his seemingly perfect marriage, but as he discovers, his brother’s life isn’t all that perfect. Vondohlen is a masterful storyteller who impressively dramatizes a cerebral character and his highly analytical thoughts. The writing is refined and lyrical: “I was increasingly able to hold the mere thought of whiskey in my head in the same way that I considered work projects or women,” Dan says. “I could linger over my preferences, from brands to glassware to ice, and I could imagine the look of a fresh pour melting a nest of perfectly clear ice cubes as clearly as though I was standing by a museum exhibit.” Weaving a story between old memories and new ideas, the introspective novel will get caught in readers’ minds.
A cerebral, contemplative story that looks inside relationships and what can hold us back.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1495921636
Page Count: 242
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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