This story is sad and sometimes overly sentimental, but Jansma’s narrative shines when he moves away from the collective...
From the author of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (2013), a deeply emotional ode to friendship—to the people who make you feel alive and who you follow without question and to the bonds that endure, even if only in memory.
“We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires.” Jansma’s novel opens with an optimistic buzz as college best friends who moved to New York City five years ago are meeting for an annual holiday party. Fancy champagne is had, an engagement is on the horizon, a new romance is brewing, and one of them, the elusive but caring artist Irene, is avoiding all conversation about the lump she found under her eye. The seriousness of this lump is revealed early on, and the novel quickly becomes less about the intoxicating feelings of possibility the city offers to dynamic groups such as this and more about how tragedy can rip holes in this beautiful illusion. “No one was special” is a realization Irene’s friends come to at different points in their story together. It hits Sara, the micromanaging do-gooder, at Duane Reade while buying adult diapers for Irene. It affects George, Sara’s fiance, who feels helpless, and William, who has loved Irene from afar for years and must now consider the purpose of his life if she’s no longer there. While the story is set specifically in New York during the 2008 recession, and while Jansma seems to want the city to be the binding force that keeps these friends together, it’s Irene, and the power of her friendship, that achieves this best. “Irene…is a magnet,” George says, and it’s true that while the city gave the friends exciting lives, it’s friendship that makes them keep on living. “There are cities with just me, and cities with only you…and even one city that we all, each of us, believe in, that never fully leaves us.” Perhaps unintentionally, Jansma’s emotional tale shows that a city can be encompassed by a person.
This story is sad and sometimes overly sentimental, but Jansma’s narrative shines when he moves away from the collective experience and focuses on the lasting impact of individual moments.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-42660-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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