Schulman (P.S., 2004, etc.) succeeds in creating an identifiable emotional landscape out of an incomprehensible tragedy.
On September 11, a Manhattan family escapes to the Hamptons as the Twin Towers fall.
Gerhard and Suzannah Falktopf are a famously bohemian downtown couple—he a German émigré and world-renowned choreographer, she a Bronx ballerina and his muse of many years. They live in an art-filled loft with their four-year-old son Nikolai, but all is not well with the family. Gerhard’s dance company (and perhaps the copyright to his choreography) has been usurped by the company’s board of directors, and Suzannah is preoccupied with Nikolai (who shows signs of autism) and the judgment of the other mothers in the park. The day’s early-morning hours are spent carrying out routines and dealing with petty irritations. Gerhard is arguing on the phone with his lawyer; Suzannah is caring for Nikolai; Celine, their beautiful and inept au pair, is sleeping off another night of partying. And then through their window they see the first tower on fire. To Schulman’s credit, the lengthy description of their shock and incredulity as the horror unfolds is at once familiar and fresh. Gerhard insists on leaving the city immediately and heads for the bank and their car. While withdrawing money, he stumbles upon a vacationing French woman, Martine, and her infant cowering in the corner; her husband was going to the World Trade Center, and now she fears the worst. He takes her with them, and the dumbstruck group head for a borrowed house in the Hamptons. The beach is beautiful, the locals are dazed and Suzannah and Gerhard go their separate ways for this fateful day, he attending to Martine, Suzannah confronting Nikolai’s disability and the future of her marriage. A largely interior novel, the almost unbroken narrative moves from exposition to the events of the day, from the reflective to the frantic, resulting in a compelling portrait of the vain Falktopfs confronting something more important than their own self-indulgent concerns.
Schulman (P.S., 2004, etc.) succeeds in creating an identifiable emotional landscape out of an incomprehensible tragedy.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-618-74654-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
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