A challenging and unsettling collection that heralds a promising talent.
Children learn to navigate a treacherous world—and childish adults help create that treachery—in these stories from first-time author Adamczyk.
In an early story in this collection, “Too Much a Child,” a young teacher lives in a city where children are being taken. No one is sure by whom or for what purpose: Something is happening here that is more sanctioned, and therefore, more sinister, than simple kidnappings. Tensions in the city are peaking, and demonstrations are breaking out with citizens demanding justice. On a bus, the teacher sits next to a small toddler and imagines kidnapping the little girl herself to keep her safe: “The desire of it was so plain, rising up, bursting out so fast, it was like something I’d spilled all over myself.” These off-kilter desires propel many of the characters here. There is the young woman who tries to communicate with her older sister, grieving a lost marriage, by writing notes to her in hair on their shared shower wall (“Needless to Say”). A graduate student throws herself at a long-haul trucker when her Abraham Lincoln–scholar boyfriend proves too tame for her impetuous spirit (“Here Comes Your Man”). In the unforgettable “Girls,” three young sisters whose parents are going through a divorce try to sate their curiosity about the contents of their grandmother’s upper floor and encounter an unsettling figure there. Adamczyk clearly values symbolism and subtlety, which can leave readers with the feeling of looking at a photograph taken in the aftermath of a major action that has taken place just outside the frame. But despite the sometimes-frustrating mystery at the core of the stories, Adamczyk has a singular imagination and an often astonishing way with metaphor.
A challenging and unsettling collection that heralds a promising talent.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-16789-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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 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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