A barely credible denouement mercifully brings to a close this ambitious but tedious tale.
Canadian Gunn’s American debut is the story of an anthropologist searching for the mother who abandoned her—in a mix of overwrought plot, deep thoughts, and anthropology.
Kate is in her early 30s, and her life is a mess: she’s been married, divorced, had numerous affairs, an abortion. She drinks too much, pops pills, and has been suspended from her teaching job because of inappropriate behavior. And naturally it’s not her fault—mother, father, stepmother are all responsible. When she learns that her stepmother Elaine has drowned, Kate finally goes back home to Twisp, Washington, which she’d left at 15, going to Canada to live with her aunt Rose when her father, Joe, married Elaine. She’d recently divorced Ray, an artist, whose teenaged daughter Patti also lives in Twisp with her own baby and husband Trevor. Once home, Kate learns that Elaine, who’d urgently wanted to talk to her before she died, turns out to have been the elder sister of her mother, Iris. Between fights with her father and bouts of heavy drinking, Kate looks through Iris’s possessions, examines old photos for clues, and places ads asking for information about Kate’s mother, who’d also had a son she put up for adoption. While Kate is busy investigating, Patti suddenly disappears, leaving her baby behind—and searchers find her body in a ravine. Patti’s disappearance and murder clumsily hint at possible parallels to Iris’s disappearance, as do the anecdotes about tribes—the Anasazi, Ik, and Tasaday—that, by becoming extinct, literally disappeared. Kate meets a woman who knew Iris when she ran off to India with her drug-addicted lover Danny. She also learns that Iris was hospitalized on her return when her behavior became erratic at home. Memories from the past return, especially the snowy day when Iris put four-year-old Kate outside in the snow while she met up again with Danny. It was the last time Kate saw her.
A barely credible denouement mercifully brings to a close this ambitious but tedious tale.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55192-486-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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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