As a writer, Kerouac is becoming more and more like the sad sack who missed the turn-off on the thruway and must now seemingly go on and on until he hits the next one. This, his latest "written on the run" remembrance, celebrates the short, sad, happy, holy life of Gerard, a brother who died from rheumatic fever at the age of 9 when Kerouac was 4. A sort of Alyosha-in-knickers, Gerard in his "little high crazycat voice" warned Jack to be kind to animals and took him "by the hand on forgotten little walks". Jack now draws "breath to tell his pain-tale for the world that needs his soft and loving like". Gerard plays with cats, birds, bubblegum cards; he goes on piggyback rides and to confession; once or twice he sees the Virgin. After the funeral, Jack concludes that life is a "vast ethereal movie, I'm an extra and Gerard is the hero and God is directing it from Heaven".... Well, what does it amount to? On one level, a book of boyhood beatitudes with a corner of Lowell, Massachusetts in the early '20's sorving as a backdrop. On another, some very contemporary concerns are represented: the search for and/or return to innocence (e.g. Salinger and his "brother" Seymour); the selfless ideal of Zen; and above all, an artistic credo. Ironically enough, nothing in Visions is as on-the-level and lovely as a comment Jack made a few years back: "After my brother died, when I was 4, they tell me I began to sit motionlessly in the parlor, pale and thin, and after a few months of sorrow began to play the old Victrola and act out movies to the music". At that time, Kerouac was the white hope of our world. May he become so again. And may he find the turn-off on the thruway.
Pub Date: June 15, 1963
ISBN: 0140144528
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Co
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1936
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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