Likable and harmless: science Nora-Ephronized into generic romance.
A plain, unmarried New York City woman’s affections vacillate between the poles of hard science and pop culture—in the first fiction from a translator daughter of John McPhee.
Narrator Marie Brown, 39, is a semiambitious tabloid obit writer obsessed with B-movie diva Nora Mars. When Mars slips into a coma, Marie jumps on the story, beginning her investigation with the star’s third ex-husband, Rex. She develops a crush on this lounge lizard, and a professional dilemma ensues: Go for the lover or the story? Marie is also a lapsed graduate student whose lingering passion for the philosophy of science interferes with her work. Boning up on relativity, physics, and quantum theory at the library, she meets Marco Trentadue, a pajama-wearing bibliophile with informed ideas on subjects dear to Marie’s mind. Their discussions of scientific theory shed light on (and provide analogies for) Marie’s ongoing investigation, which takes her into some dark and mysterious places in Nora Mars’s past. Nora’s estranged sister, Maud, offers insights that conflict significantly with Rex’s version of events. The story caroms between investigative leads and library chats that resonate in Marie’s head. Marco, we learn, is a WIMP (a “weakly interacting massive particle”), while Rex is a MACHO (a “massive compact halo object”). The subjectivity of biographical “truth” is linked to the theory of relativity. Interwoven into each section of Marie’s investigation are lines from movies—some real, some imagined—invoking Nora’s film- and “real-life” wit. These dialogue snippets often provide clever counterpoint to the scientific aphorisms that form the chapters’ epigraphs, but the use of science to comment on romance is a bright idea undermined by the author’s regrettable tendency toward cuteness.
Likable and harmless: science Nora-Ephronized into generic romance.Pub Date: July 17, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-50077-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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