A rare case of a novel getting it both ways: A formal, tightly constructed narrative that accommodates the mess of everyday...
Seemingly everybody on the class ladder scrabbles for a definition of human decency in the latest from Thompson (The Year We Left Home, 2011, etc.).
The novel opens with a penetrating vision of a lower-middle-class family sinking fast. Sean is a divorced, out-of-work handyman who’s about to lose his Bay Area house and his grip on his teenage son, Conner; when Sean decides to meet a woman via Craigslist, the attempted one-night stand only leaves his body broken in a highway wreck. The bad news doesn’t stop there: Nearby, divorcee Art is forced to take in his teenage daughter, who’s become a disciplinary nightmare back in Ohio after witnessing her half sister’s murder in a school shooting. After a stint of petty thievery, Conner does odd jobs for a wealthy widow, Mrs. Foster, who wants to do something with her late husband’s largesse. So, she taps her nurse, Christie (also Art’s neighbor), to run a nonprofit with a vague purpose and name: The Humanity Project. The worlds-in-collision setup is contrived, but Thompson’s handling of it is superb and unforced. She wants to explore how much of our bad behavior, from lousy dates to murder, is hard-wired, and in Sean and Conner, she exposes how much our actions are grim functions of economic circumstance. Yet this book isn’t preachy, and Thompson has a knack for rendering characters who are emotionally fluid but of a piece: A daughter of Mrs. Foster’s who’s outraged at her squandered inheritance is selfish, yes, but her despair about a nonprofit’s ability to repair humanity is legitimate. Thompson caps the story with a smart twist ending that undoes many of the certainties the reader arrived at in the preceding pages.
A rare case of a novel getting it both ways: A formal, tightly constructed narrative that accommodates the mess of everyday lives.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-15871-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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