Severely overdone: A True Story . . . ends up seeming little different from cheap romance with a highfalutin’ narration.
An overwrought and overwritten account of a doomed Mexican household, by poet, biographer, and novelist Clement (Widow Basquiat, not reviewed).
Leonora is one of seven illegitimate children raised by a poor but independent woman in the Mexican hinterland. Used to hard work at an early age, she is sent off to migrant farmer camps while still a child, but eventually she’s placed in the care of nuns at a convent school some distance from her native village. There, she’s decently educated and trained in household skills, and the sisters find her a position as nanny in the home of a well-to-do family in Mexico City. Mr. O’Conner, the master of the house, is a descendant of Irish immigrants who settled in Mexico in the 19th century. A lawyer who represents wealthy clients, some of them quite dubious, he is known to have a mistress. His wife Lourdes is a pious society lady, devoted to her two sons and involved in charity work. Leonora isn’t in the household long before O’Conner seduces her. She soon finds herself pregnant, and O’Connor’s wife convinces her to remain in their employ and allow her and her husband to adopt the child. She does both, but it becomes increasingly difficult for her to stand by and see her own daughter raised by others. She tries to run away but is dissuaded by the other servants, who warn her that the child is registered as the O’Conners’ daughter now and that taking her away would be a form of kidnapping. The situation isn’t much easier for Mrs. O’Conner, who falls into a deep depression at the daily reminder of her husband’s infidelity and becomes harder and harder to live with. Eventually, both Leonora and Lourdes solve their respective difficulties by taking the only honorable way out.
Severely overdone: A True Story . . . ends up seeming little different from cheap romance with a highfalutin’ narration.Pub Date: July 31, 2002
ISBN: 1-84195-166-8
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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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