A dull, slow-moving second novel.
A young fiddler leaves home with a twofold mission: to make it big in Nashville and to find his father.
Jesse Alison has been living alone with his mother in Vermont since his singer/guitarist father, Hank, abandoned them when Jesse was eight. Now Jesse is 19, and it’s time for him to leave, too. He loves his mother, but her neediness overwhelms him. (Their situation is reminiscent of the mother-son relationship in Spatz’s debut, No One But Us, 1995.) Jesse has won statewide fiddle contests, though with his father absent, the victories felt hollow; his idol is bluegrass patriarch Bill Monroe, and his dream is to be one of his Bluegrass Boys. Driving south, Jesse gets some bad news: Monroe has had a heart attack. In Nashville he stays with Genny, a former Vermont neighbor and second mother to him. She’s a lesbian who makes and repairs violins. Genny introduces him to the lively Nashville scene; it’s a shame Spatz renders it so tepidly, concentrating on Jesse’s immersion in the sounds of his fellow musicians rather than the human interactions. Jesse has a bright future, but before lining up any gigs, he moves on to Mississippi to track down his father, taking with him a red violin Genny has been repairing. Jesse finds Hank living with Grace, a black gospel singer, and managing her career; he no longer plays himself. It’s an awkward reunion. Jesse wants details of his past, but Hank can’t tell him much, not even his birthplace; he wasn’t around. He admits to being “a dog and a coward,” but Jesse knew that already. His reality check does lead to one epiphany: He will never be a Bluegrass Boy. Monroe had been a fantasy father, and it’s too late to join his family.
A dull, slow-moving second novel.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-87074-508-5
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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