There are many wonderful moments in this ambitious tale of Native America in conflict with paternalistic white culture—unquestionably the best fiction yet from Silko. Its settings are the southwestern and northeastern US, England, and Europe near the end of the 19th century, and its resonant theme is the imperfect adaptation of a girl of the (Arizona) Sand Lizard Indian tribe and an educated woman seeking independence to each other’s starkly contrasting “worlds.” The story begins (and, sadly, during its first hundred pages, sags) with a detailed account of the survival of preadolescent Indigo and her older “Sister Salt” when a massacre of their people by US cavalry leaves them orphaned, to be raised and tutored by their resourceful grandmother. When the beloved “Granny Fleet” dies, the sisters are captured, sent to white schools, and separated—after which the innocent Indigo enchants, and is effectively adopted by, Hattie Palmer, the young wife of the much older Edward, a botanist and explorer driven by both scientific and mercenary ambitions. During travels with the Palmers back east and abroad (climaxing with their viewing, in an Italian village, of a cache of carved stone “fertility figures”), Indigo’s “education” acquaints her with such alien commonplaces of white culture as sexual irregularity and hypocrisy, Christianity’s strong moralistic component, and “civilization’s” proprietary attitude toward the natural world. A chastened return to Arizona, and Indigo’s (not quite believable) reunion with her sister, now an unwed mother, occasions an awkwardly overplotted series of ironic reversals that leave the disillusioned Hattie (easily the best character here) only a mocking simulacrum of the “liberation” she has pursued. Given that Silko (Almanac of the Dead, 1991, etc.) is less a novelist than a lyrical observer and celebrant of Native American life, this daunting fiction is, despite several longueurs and narrative miscalculations, both a thoughtful exploration of the incompatibility of dissimilar traditions and an absorbing reading experience.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-81154-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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