A battered child grows up to become a homicidal nurse's aide—in this depressing, minor addition to Oates's oeuvre. When Kathleen Hennessy's younger sister, Nola, is murdered, 12-year-old Kathleen is removed at once from the Detroit motel room where both girls were regularly beaten by their unemployed father and abandoned by their mother, a beauty-parlor worker. Kathleen's father is imprisoned for Nola's murder, while Kathleen is placed in a dreary foster home where her half-forgotten memories of having pounded Nola's head against the edge of a mattress frame to stop her crying are buried beneath a passive, shy, obedient persona that appeals to her harried guardian. Some time later, after Kathleen has silently suffered repeated sexual abuse at the hands of her foster brother, the house in which she lives burns down "accidentally," killing several inhabitants—but no one thinks to suspect the overweight, shyly smiling teen-aged girl of wrongdoing. Kathleen grows into a self-effacing young nurse's aide benignly ignored by all, suppressing her unconscious rage beneath the comforting rituals of hospital sanitation, the solace of religion, and dreams of love. But her luck remains dismal: the drug-addicted young intern whom Kathleen adores impregnates and then abandons her. Kathleen performs an abortion on herself, and a short time later a number of her hospital patients unexpectedly die. Still unsuspected, Kathleen opts to leave while she can for a new job at a suburban convalescent home, where in the decades to come she'll continue to pursue her strange career. A grim tale—little more than a character sketch—and not among Oates's more memorable accomplishments.
Pub Date: April 30, 1991
ISBN: 0-8112-1171-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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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