An omnium-gatherum of 20th-century physics and spirituality that ultimately gathers too much.
A sprawling, heady tale of time travel with detours into alternative religion, pulp science fiction, the Holocaust, and much, much—much—more.
The fourth novel by Wray (Lowboy, 2009, etc.) is narrated by Waldemar “Waldy” Tolliver, whom we first meet in a Harlem apartment that he claims isn’t obeying the typical forward movement of time. That gives him the opportunity to write this book, addressed to a former lover, about how time has long been the family business: his great-grandfather claimed to have sorted out time travel but was killed before he could make his findings known. His two sons continued his investigations, one by experimenting on the occupants of a Nazi death camp; Waldy’s father in turn adapted their convoluted efforts into a popular 1960s flower-power sci-fi novel, which inspired a Scientology-esque religion that’s entangled the narrator. And “entangled” is the operative word here. Wray aspires to a blend of Michael Chabon’s pop-culture–soaked flights of fancy and Jonathan Lethem’s humid braininess, and sometimes it clicks: the porn-pulp oeuvre of Waldy’s father, and the way it became a hippie totem à la On the Road or Siddhartha, has life and humor, and he crafts an entertaining portrait of his great aunts, occupants of that Harlem apartment so cluttered they evoke the Collyer brothers and who in their heyday were admired for their quirky appreciation of time travel. (Wray cannily ventriloquizes a Joan Didion article on the pair.) But juggling all this family history along with the mechanics of history and Einstein makes this a more plodding novel than it ought to be, especially given Wray’s talents and ambition. The story “involves the Gestapo, and the war, and the speed of light, and a card game no one plays anymore,” as Waldy puts it, but its moving parts mesh stiffly.
An omnium-gatherum of 20th-century physics and spirituality that ultimately gathers too much.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-28113-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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