A sad story about a sad girl slouching toward the end of the world.
In the last days of modern civilization, a young orphan from Boston makes her way across the dangerous wastelands of America. This is not an adventure for her.
Post-apocalyptic novels can bend in a lot of directions—in the past decade we've seen the murky emotional depths of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the political metaphor of World War Z by Max Brooks, and the fragile state of fear of Edan Lepucki's California. This debut novel by acclaimed short story writer van den Berg (The Isle of Youth, 2013, etc.) tends to lean much closer to the realms of literary fiction with its complex psychology. Our heroine is the ironically named Joy Jones, an emotionally barren young woman with no family or friends who now slogs at a day job under the influence of a soul-deadening amount of cough syrup. She's not the most ebullient spirit even before a modern plague strikes, killing half the world. She’s given to saying things like, “I wonder if I will ever know what it’s like to feel at peace,” and “No one will ever write a Wikipedia page for me.” As hundreds of thousands of victims succumb, Joy is taken to a hospital complex in Kansas where she's subjected to strange tests both medical and psychological, has emotionless sex with her roommate and recoils at the deaths of twin boys. While at the hospital, Joy learns that her long-lost mother is an underwater archaeologist featured in a series of television documentaries that she watches like they are her only lifeline. The remainder of the book covers Joy’s trek to find her mother, traveling in the company of Marcus, a boy who shared one of her many foster homes. Van den Berg’s writing is curiously beautiful, and her portrayals can also be disarmingly sensitive, as if we might break this girl just by reading about her. “I’ve grown up knowing the world is fragile,” she says. “No one needs to tell me that.”
A sad story about a sad girl slouching toward the end of the world.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-15471-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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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