Former standup comic Landvik debuts with a homespun beauty- parlor melodrama, Minneapolis-set. Patty Jane is 21 when she marries Thor, an impossibly handsome architect-in-training. Impregnated on their wedding night, she feels her husband growing painfully distant as her girth increases. After a fight, Thor disappears for good. Disconsolate Patty Jane is tended by her sister Harriet, who's madly in love with Avel, pint- sized heir to a cereal fortune. Then Avel is killed in a plane crash. Cut forward a decade. Patty Jane is now the proprietor of the House of Curl, a needlepoint-appointed beauty parlor where a gang of salt-of-the-earth locals with names like Inky and Crabby gathers for restorative good-ol'-gal group therapy. Harriet plays her harp; Thor's mother bakes; handsome Clyde Chuka does manicures. Patty Jane even introduces a House of Curl lecture series, in which the girls hold forth on their obsessions: Decorating with Fabrics, Legends of Hollywood. But then Harriet starts to drink. She walks out on home and harp, and soon is panhandling, turning tricks, and vomiting in dumpsters. Meanwhile, Patty Jane, missing her sister, falls into Clyde Chuka's arms. Later, a recovering alcoholic cop named Reese befriends down-and-out Harriet and lures her to A.A.; she slowly works at being sober, then rejoins her family, Reese in tow. One day, though, Harriet spots a familiar-looking zombie: Thor, brain-damaged on the night of his long-ago fight with Patty Jane, has been kept prisoner by a crazy former oral surgeon. He's rescued and welcomed back into the House of Curl circle. But then Harriet is diagnosed with lung cancer, and the gang gathers for a teary deathbed scene beforeguess what?bounding spunkily back. Though the elaborately crafted wackiness and cloying coziness of the beauty-parlor scene will annoy some, readers hungry for an easy-to-swallow tale of female—not feminist—solidarity may find this a satisfying, sugary treat.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-882593-12-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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