A haunting portrait of an era that only gets better as it goes along.
Set amid the social upheaval of the 1960s, Kohler’s sensitive debut follows a pair of San Francisco siblings struggling to make sense of the roles that have been set out for them.
After their mother’s sudden death, 20-year-old Jeannie and 14-year-old Kip find themselves existentially and practically adrift. Over the course of the next few years, Jeannie trades secretarial school for a waitressing job, meets a nice doctor (a Goldwater supporter), gets pregnant, and marries him, becoming—on paper, at least—the epitome of 1960s domestic success. Meanwhile, Kip, restless and brooding, gets caught trying to rob a supposedly abandoned liquor store. In court, the judge presents him with two options: finish high school or join the military, and in spite of Jeannie and their World War II–veteran father, Kip decides to enlist in the Marine Corps. Kip and Jeannie have at least one thing in common, though: they’re both trapped in lives that don’t quite fit. In San Francisco, Jeannie—always conventional, even prim—becomes enchanted with a young woman involved in the underground anti-war movement. Across an ocean in Vietnam, Kip—overwhelmed by the extent of the violence and ill-suited to the constant humiliation of Marine life—finds himself accused of a horrific military crime. Against the wishes of her conservative in-laws, Jeannie becomes consumed by the case and, in the process, is forced to come to terms with the life she’s built. Told in alternating perspectives, the novel takes a while to hit its stride, and the first sections nearly buckle under the weight of so many sepia-toned '60s clichés. But if it begins as a somewhat expected family period piece, the book progresses into something wholly original: dark, rich, and morally challenging.
A haunting portrait of an era that only gets better as it goes along.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08092-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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