LIONS AT LAMB HOUSE

Name: LIONS AT LAMB HOUSE
Author: Jr. Yoder
ISBN: 978-1-933372-34-1

by Jr. Yoder ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2007

Yoder, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, doesn’t get much more dramatic than these high-minded face-offs, but the overall...

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Sigmund Freud spars with Henry James in this light and amusing historical novel.

Although there is no evidence that Freud ever met novelist James, the contemporary thinkers would have had much to discuss. In this fanciful imagining of such a meeting, Yoder (Telling Others What to Think, 2004, etc.) envisions a visit brought about by the novelist’s brother (and Freud’s psychological colleague) William James, who fears that Henry’s increasingly ornate later literary style is the result of obsessive neuroses. The year is 1908, when the younger James was in fact revising his earlier works. Yoder creates a young scholar, Horace Briscoe, to observe the events both at the time and from a later date when, as a noted academic, he must decide what to do with Freud’s incomplete case notes taken during a brief, informal psychoanalysis performed on the novelist during the visit. Briscoe also serves as the hero of a romantic subplot, as his courtship of the troubled but beautiful Agnes brings more human drama into play. But the action in this brief novel is really between the great men, and they are at odds from the start. James’ famed celibacy, for example, makes an obvious focus for Freud, who was then disseminating his theories of infantile sexuality and the Oedipal complex. But to the fastidious, if not prissy, James, such notions are repellent. To James, the Austrian intellectual is primarily a wonderful character; he is chiefly concerned with capturing the doctor’s mannerisms as fodder for letters to his dear friend, Edith Wharton. When James begins poking fun at Freud, his young assistant steps in to warn the doctor, and the long passages detailing the great minds’ views of each other are the highlight of the book.

Yoder, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, doesn’t get much more dramatic than these high-minded face-offs, but the overall effect is knowledgeable fun.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007

ISBN: 978-1-933372-34-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Europa Editions

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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CONCLAVE

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...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.