THE MADONNA OF LAS VEGAS

Name: THE MADONNA OF LAS VEGAS
Author: Gregory Blake Smith
ISBN: 1-4000-8186-6

by Gregory Blake Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 23, 2005

The author provides first a tragic and then a happy ending, relying in both cases on the readers’ emotions to give the...

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An arch metaphysical mystery from Smith (The Divine Comedy of John Venner, 1992, etc.).

This is the kind of book in which Mafia goons say things like, “What we have here is text and commentary,” and when someone administers a lie detector test, he asks, “Are you in league with the dark gods?” The guy with the dark god obsession is artist Cosmo Dust (get it?), who has had painful experience with the randomness of fate: His adored wife Cathy died after eating an Easter egg laced with cyanide by an unknown maniac. At first it seems that this will be a relatively conventional story of grieving, as we meet Cosmo in Las Vegas shortly before Christmas and shortly after he’s quit his job painting a replica of the Sistine Chapel ceiling for the Golden Calf casino (get it?). His memories of Cathy tell a touching story of love and loss. It’s too bad that they lead into a convoluted saga involving a dead cocktail waitress and Cosmo’s flight from the law with a baby and a Mafia chief’s daughter—no, actually she may be Pope John Paul I’s illegitimate daughter, or maybe she’s the female Messiah that Gnostic Christians have been waiting for. Readers inclined to say, “huh?,” at this point are not the right audience for Smith’s mannered narrative, which really goes off the rails when characters begin talking about Earth and counter-Earth (the former moves from genuine to fake, the latter in the opposite direction) and about “intermittency,” which is “a moment when the old order is discovered again.” All this high-falutin’ chat sends Cosmo and the Pope’s daughter to the Venetian hotel’s fake Piazza San Marco, where in the novel’s most arbitrary twist, Cosmo meets the man who murdered his wife.

The author provides first a tragic and then a happy ending, relying in both cases on the readers’ emotions to give the dénouement a weight his highly artificial text has not earned.

Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-8186-6

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MAZE AT WINDERMERE
by Gregory Blake Smith

- BOOK REVIEW
THE DIVINE COMEDY OF JOHN VENNER
by Gregory Blake Smith

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.

Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985

ISBN: 038549081X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
BURNING QUESTIONS
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.