Fine work from a quintessentially American writer.
Another atmospheric Montana drama from Doig (Mountain Times, 1999, etc.), this one taking a side trip to Manhattan during the Harlem Renaissance as it portrays three strong, self-willed protagonists grappling with racial prejudice and their own emotions.
Susan Duff, last seen as a schoolgirl in Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987), is now a 40-year-old singing teacher in Helena, contentedly alone years after her affair with wealthy, married Wes Williamson cost him the Montana gubernatorial race. Wes walks back into her life on a March evening in 1924 to ask if he can hire Susan to coach his chauffeur, Monty Rathbun. Monty has an extraordinary voice, but he’s also the son of an African-American soldier who later went to work for the Williamsons. There aren’t many colored folks in Montana, but there is a branch of the Ku Klux Klan, which decides that Susan isn’t just giving Monty singing lessons and threatens them both. Monty heads to Harlem, where he begins making a name with his “spirit songs” and acquires a Negro manager who sends him on the road. An attack by a KKK wannabe in Helena damages his voice and leaves him vulnerable enough to confess that he’s fallen in love with his coach; Susan, though again involved with Wes, realizes her feelings for Monty are also strong. Ushering his characters toward a climactic concert at Carnegie Hall, Doig does his usual splendid job of interweaving several time frames to bring alive American history and to chart the evolving relationships of thorny, independent people who love fiercely but never go easy on one another or themselves. His marvelously idiosyncratic sentences have the bite of mountain air and the springy rhythms of mountain folks’ speech, but they’re also more disciplined and less gnarled than in some past work. It all combines to create a compelling story that ends too soon—but given Doig’s career-long fondness for revisiting the intertwined families of Montana’s Two Medicine country, we can perhaps hope to see Susan, Wes, and Monty (or at least their relatives) again.
Fine work from a quintessentially American writer.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-0135-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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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