An ambitious domestic drama that nails the domestic parts but doesn’t always sell its drama.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, the Holocaust, and civic corruption are just where the troubles begin for one LA family.
Anne, the much-put-upon heroine of Raymond’s third novel (Rain Dragon, 2012, etc.), is concerned to distraction with three men in her family. Her elderly father, Sam, a Holocaust survivor, resists her efforts to move him into a nursing home; her son, Aaron, is a high school senior with no clear direction; and her brother, Ben, is a former sniper who’s returned from the Middle East with obvious psychic damage. Anne doesn’t exactly have it together herself: a senior staffer at LA County’s Department of Sustainability, she’s getting wooed by an entrepreneur eager to rope her into an unethical scheme to privatize the region’s wastewater. Raymond gestures toward framing this story as a widescreen study of morality and evil: Aaron goes on a road trip with Sam where a theft unlocks some of grandpa’s closely held Auschwitz memories, and Ben’s sanity degrades to the point where he begins plotting assassinations of power brokers. But the novel never quite finds that serious tone, some of which is due to the sprawl of the plot, some of which is due to Raymond’s knack for breezier, ground-level storytelling—he’s at his best when he’s skewering LA’s bureaucracy (“a centerless hive of back channels and side alleys, pitted with private dungeons”) or how Aaron is comically waylaid by a moment of adolescent lust. The novel’s big-picture material tends to feature more pretentious, shapeless prose, as when Ben experiences “eyeless, voiceless faces, wavering in the air, shooting razors of pain”—lines that don’t quite sell the madness that allegedly consumes the ex-sniper. Each character study is thoughtfully constructed, but the novel is less than the sum of its parts.
An ambitious domestic drama that nails the domestic parts but doesn’t always sell its drama.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55597-760-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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
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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