Scholarship as romance: intricate, erudite, and intensely pleasurable.
A Renaissance mystery rattles the lives of four Princeton roommates—in an astonishingly good debut by a young team of writers who have put their expensive educations to much better use than classmates who keep screwing up governments.
The mystery is the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a real Renaissance text that reads like six Handel operas after a bout in the food processor. Narrator Thomas Corelli Sullivan is one of four stout friends and roommates in their last year at Princeton. Before his accidental death, Sullivan’s father was himself obsessed by the headbusting puzzles built into the book by its anonymous author, and that obsession, nearly the ruin of his marriage, is now threatening Tom’s. Waifish Paul Harris, perhaps the most brilliant of the friends, building on the work of numerous scholars including Tom’s late father, has begun to crack the book’s codes, and his work has sucked Tom into a world he hoped to avoid. Neglecting his own studies and his immensely attractive girlfriend Katie, Tom lends his own formidable knowledge and intuition to Paul’s labors. Their findings seem to bear out the theories for which Tom’s father was ridiculed by Vincent Taft, a rival scholar now in residence down the road at the Institute for Advanced Studies, and the authorship seems clearly to have been that of Francesco Colonna, an aristocrat and member of the inner circle of great Florentine humanists. What remains elusive is the great mystery at the center of the text, which has to do with the location and purpose of an immense crypt Colonna had ordered up. Tom emerges from the intellectual hothouse just in time to save his degree and his love life, but Paul charges ahead until he, Tom, and the other two plucky roommates find themselves, without ever leaving Princeton, in extraordinary peril. Academic evil stalks the campus and no one is safe.
Scholarship as romance: intricate, erudite, and intensely pleasurable.Pub Date: May 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-33711-6
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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 novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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