Coming up with a judgment on Something Happened (you'll wait a while for that something to happen — nothing does until the shattering clincher) should be the hottest game of Russian roulette in town this fall. There's probably more riding on this book than any other in terms of author anticipation and publisher expectation. It runs close to 600 pages and is full of repetition which can be one of those suicidal assets ("call the repetition perseveration" — that's Heller) in what amounts to a story without a story sans the pseudo of those now dated anti-novels. Heller's novel, Heller's tour de verbal force, Heller's stomp then, is a representation of the underachieved contemporary man boobytrapped all the way from his harassment at home to the office where he's making his way up over someone else's body. Perhaps he's closest to one of Roth's middle-aged, self-made victims, full of lapsed hopes and more guilts than any man should have to assume. Ecce homo — Bob Slocum, always on the verge of something ominously imminent — prostate, suicide, failure, death — while only having experienced a string of little satisfactions, "jobs, love affairs and fornications." Slocum figures negatively as husband of a wife who now drinks too much even if she has become more amatory in the process, father of a daughter who challenges, provokes and undermines him, also of a son who is diffident and withdrawn whom he loves best of all, and non-father of Derek whom they prefer not to think about at all. He's retarded and "looks like lockjaw" when he talks. Hardly a new type, Bob Slocum, on the cramped plateau of middle-age, "tense, poor, bleak, listless, depressed," and rightly feeling that "there is no place for me to go." He's infinitely vulnerable. And undecided. Should they put Derek away? Should he get a divorce? "l have acrimony. . .I have more pain than acrimony." Obviously there is none of the rogue absurdism or imaginative verve of Catch-22; only a circular sameness which one may justify (even if it is monotonous) with the Teacup observation of a much more serene man, Oliver Wendell Holmes: "What if one does say the same things — of course in a little different form each time — over and over. If he has anything to say worth saying, that is just what he ought to do." It is worth saying (or reiterating — however you want to look at it) to the degree that Slocum is symptomatic of this age — beleaguered all the way from his bad teeth to his rotten conscience. We know him only too well and it is the recognition factor which counts, along with the book's bravura, expertise and cumulative hook. . . . Whatever, wherever, Heller's Kvetch-570 will be read and read and read.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1974
ISBN: 0684841215
Page Count: 582
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1974
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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SEEN & HEARD
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