by Joseph Heller ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 8, 1984
Some Promised Land. The honey was there, but the milk we brought in with our goats. To people in California, God gives a magnificent coastline, a movie industry, and Beverly Hills. To us He gives:sand. To Cannes He gives a plush film festival. We get the PLO." Who's that talking, you ask? That's none other than the Old Testament's King David, who retells his long Biblical story on his deathbed—with a voice (and a viewpoint) that's part Mel Brooks, part Woody Allen, and all Joseph Heller. King David lies dying, terminally cold, unwarmed even by the lovely virgin Abishag the Shunammite. He still lusts after zaftig wife Bathsheba, who won't accommodate David's lust until he agrees to declare Solomon—a doltish plagiarist—as successor to the crown of Israel. So the miserable old king remembers the whole shmear: from crazy Saul and stupid Goliath to poor, snake-ish Absalom. And Heller has a generous grab-bag of ironic, earthy ideas here: David the psalmist, the career-poet, jealous when his best material is stolen by Solomon; David the Jewish husband, with first-wife Michal as the original J.A.P.; David the aging scion and general. Throughout, in fact, the Biblical original is worked through closely, with impressive stamina and elaboration—and, as a short story or novella, perhaps, the notion would have been pure champagne. . . even if clearly pressed from the grapes of Brooks' 2000-Year-Old-Man routines. Here, however, as in George MacDonald Fraser's swashbuckling parody, The Pyrates (p. 586), the basic gimmicks—the blithely outrageous anachronisms, the double-takes, the raunchy Yiddish/English slang, the varied lampoons on King James Bible phraseology—become dutiful and predictable at big-novel length. Meanwhile, Heller's more interesting character/history/theology inventions (e.g., the David/Bathsheba relationship) remain undeveloped, with the Borscht Belt rhythms too relentless to allow for depth or nuance. And the entire vaudeville enterprise eventually seems wilted, formula-creased. Still, what Heller manages to do with faithful attention to the scriptures of Samuel I and II and Kings is often remarkable. ("The first time I laid eyes on Abigail—I was girded for battle and thirsting for vengeance as I marched along the road to Carmel—my member grew hard as hickory and I sheepishly and modestly veiled it from notice with a folded newspaper.") It's also often shtick-ishly hilarious: "'You said pisseth, didn't you?' 'Pisseth?' "That'th right. You thaid all who pisseth against the wall.' 'I timid pisseth?' I was furious now and answered him with a heat that equaled his own. 'I thaid no thuch thing.' 'Yeth, you did. Athk anyone.'" So, though sometimes only half-amusing and never really persuasive as a serious theological farce (David is waiting for an apology from God), Heller's Biblical free-for-all is sure to win a substantial, curious, browsing-and-sampling audience.
Pub Date: Oct. 8, 1984
ISBN: 0684841258
Page Count: 373
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984
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by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016
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
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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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