The story of two sisters who may have had a hand in their brother's death, British writer Dunmore's first novel to be published in the US, combines the suspense of a Hitchcock thriller with a captivating family drama. Nina loves London, but she's relieved to be invited out to the English countryside to help her ailing older sister, Isabel, after the difficult birth of the latter's first child. A wonderful cook who prefers to fix problems rather than talk about them, Nina, an artist and photographer, longs to make herself useful in the home of the beautiful sister she's always idolized. Others have arrived to help as well: Richard, Isabel's concerned but itinerant economist husband; Susan, a young baby-sitter who's just finished her nanny course; and Isabel's best friend, Edward, a homosexual who causes his share of resentment by keeping Isabel all to himself day and night for heart-to-heart chats in her room. The more the adults rub shoulders in the lovely house near the sea, the more the fissures between them become apparent. The weaknesses of Isabel's marriage are exposed when she orders Richard to sleep downstairs and subtly encourages his sexual interest in her sister. Susan, meanwhile, seems to want to keep baby Antony for herself, and Edward all but accuses the others of selfishly looking after their own petty needs while sweet Isabel languishes. The deepest, most horrifying family secret emerges only gradually in fragmentary images, as Nina begins to recall the demise of her infant brother when Isabel was seven and Nina four. Could Isabel have murdered that baby in a fit of sibling jealousy? If so, could she murder again? Nina struggles to remember what really happened during their childhood as time runs out for Antony and as the webs of family intrigue tighten around her. Sophisticated, sensual, frightening, and remarkably visual: a first-rate debut.
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-316-19741-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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
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