A fun, fast read with a rich premise that ultimately fails to pay off.
From Nicholson (Flesh Guitar, 1998, etc.), a comic cross-cultural romance mixed with a droll consideration of architectural aesthetics suggests that ruins—human and monumental—can be beautiful.
Kelly Howell, a British taxi driver, is “ruined” because she’s not pursuing her genetic potential: her father was the late Christopher Howell, architecture’s most celebrated failure, a cult hero though he completed only one building. Into Kelly’s life now comes Jack Dexter, a Californian who himself appears a bit of a ruin—limping, drinking, complaining. The couple’s initial relationship is professional: Dexter hires Kelly to guide him around England as he gathers impressions and, inadvertently, offends his guide’s British propriety, the plot beginning to turn on the romantic tension between this contrasting pair. She is a ruin, he is a fixer. Although the revelation of the true reason for Dexter’s visit provides an effective twist for which the groundwork has been carefully laid, getting there proves more intriguing than does arriving on a trip that will show readers an on-going discrepancy between the story’s emotionally cool tone and its deeper ambition. In the course of events, an old man is brutally beaten, and a menacing, unstable drifter burns to death, violent acts that are curiously undisturbing in the context of an otherwise droll, entertaining narrative. Kelly, the central consciousness, remains something of an enigma, as does Dexter, for that matter, who disappears from the story at a crucial point. To paraphrase the author’s words (applied to a different object), there’s a chilly, masculine emptiness about the prose despite its elegance. Funny, provocative essays by the dead architect father, interpolated into the text in an irregular pattern, fail to illuminate the characters fully, though they do enrich our sense of the environments around us.
A fun, fast read with a rich premise that ultimately fails to pay off.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-58567-036-7
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
