It’s better than Blonde (2000). But that’s a little like saying that Plato’s Timaeus goes down easier than the Parmenides.
Oates’s fat new opus (her 29th full-length novel, if anyone is still counting) traces the effects of an inscrutable sculptor’s benign personality and aura on a townful of admirers who find their lives permanently altered by the memory of him.
Adam Berendt, the mystery man of the prosperous upstate New York village of Salthill-on-Hudson, suffers fatal cardiac arrest while attempting to save a drowning child. The several (mostly married) women who had adored his playful, provocative intellect and perversely attractive physical ugliness (including one blind eye) react variously to the loss of their social circle’s very own Socrates (for Oates makes it explicit: even giving Adam a faithful dog named Apollodoros, after the real Socrates’s dutiful young companion). Neurasthenic divorcée Abigail Des Pres works through a borderline-incestuous fixation on her surly teenaged son. Thirtyish bookstore owner Marina Troy becomes the surprised beneficiary of Adam’s whimsical largesse. Adam’s attorney Roger Cavanagh battles his embittered ex-wife and accusatory adolescent daughter, while enduring sexual fixations on both the unresponsive Marina (who soon moves away) and a feisty feminist paralegal. Timid Camille Hoffmann soothes her loneliness by “mothering” a brood of abandoned canines (including, of course, “Apollo”), and Rubens-like beauty Augusta Cutler (the Shelley Winters part) travels the country deciphering the mystery of Adam’s past. As in Oates’s Broke Heart Blues (1999), the oracle proves something less than his acolytes had imagined. Still, all ends more or less affirmatively (this being a “romance”); there’s even a climactic reconciliation in a fabricated Garden of Eden. Middle Age has its moments, but it’s basically redundant and shapeless (Oates is still introducing new material barely ten pages prior to its end), and very heavily indebted to Plato’s numerous portrayals of Socrates (caves and shadows loom up frequently), several Iris Murdoch novels (Revered Charismatic Figure Shapes Lives of Those Who Loved Him), and especially John Updike’s Couples (Salthill=Tarbox?; and the concluding chapters contain multiple echoes of Couples’s denouement).
It’s better than Blonde (2000). But that’s a little like saying that Plato’s Timaeus goes down easier than the Parmenides.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-620946-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
