Inventive if not always complete.
The veteran Canadian novelist and poet follows up her American debut (Tracing Iris, 2003) with stories that show narrative aptitude, a degree of experimentation, and a proclivity for the poetic turn.
The centerpiece is the title novella, really more like a collection within the collection, following a pair of sisters through five pieces, some of which appeared individually in literary journals. In “Versions,” family stories about younger sister Claire being held dangerously out a window by older sister Marcia achieve the mythic in their various retellings; in “The Savage God” (vide A. Alvarez), both girls are in Sylvia Plath mode, and they eventually head for a lake with a boy who might not return; “Family Reunion” recounts a dinner when the sisters are much older, when all that old self-destructive behavior provides material for members of the family to humiliate each other; “Inside Editions” follows Claire as she visits Marcia in early middle age, on the occasion of Marcia’s first extramarital affair; and eventually the family (“Thicker Than Water”) gathers once again for a final vacation on the occasion of the parents’ 45th anniversary. Gunn demonstrates versatility throughout the rest of the collection, though some of her smaller short-shorts might be more accurately described as false starts than actual prose poems. “Los Desperados” is perhaps the finest of the bunch, about a couple on the rocks who return to the place of their original happiness, a honeymoon in Mexico, only to find that the place is as changed as they are, and to happen upon a swinging Mexican general with designs to pry them apart for good. Another winner is “Fugue,” about a dead relationship that finds its best metaphor in its seemingly musical repetition of a cat torturing a mole on a balcony.
Inventive if not always complete.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2003
ISBN: 1-55192-566-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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