Female adolescence as imagined by one of the 20th century’s best—and most peculiar—writers.
A quirky coming-of-age story, published in 1976 and newly back in print, from a two-time winner of the Whitbread Award.
Her mother gave her the name Marigold Daisy Green. Then her mother died, and now everyone calls her Bilgewater—a pun on “Bill’s daughter” crafted by her father's students at a boys' school in the remote north of England. Bilgie knows that her dead mother and her glorious name make her seem like a creature from a fairy tale, just as she knows that, with her thick body and thicker specs, she’s no one’s idea of a princess. This doesn’t stop her from daydreaming about the magnificent Jack Rose. Nor does her awareness of her own inadequacies make her in any way jealous of the shockingly resplendent Grace Gathering, a childhood friend who returns—after being kicked out of two posh schools—to the home of her father, who's the school's headmaster. Bilgewater’s adolescence is filled with clichés both ancient and modern. Grace, for example, serves as Bilgie's ideal of the Lady of Shalott: uncommonly beautiful but maybe best dead and safely out of the running. In one weird weekend, Bilgewater will endure a gin-soaked party with Jack Rose’s parents and almost lose her virginity in a garret. But anyone familiar with Gardam’s work will trust the author to know what she’s doing with well-worn tropes. Gardam (God on the Rocks, 2010, etc.) clearly recognizes that motifs persist for a reason: because they conform to fundamental human experiences, because they fulfill basic narrative needs. And she also understands the role that stories might play in the life of a girl being raised by an abstracted, academic father. That said, Bilgewater emerges entirely as herself, a singular first-person narrator in control of her own story.
Female adolescence as imagined by one of the 20th century’s best—and most peculiar—writers.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60945-331-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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