The prolific Bell's ninth novel (All Souls' Rising, 1995, etc.) uses a miscellany of narrators to recount the experiences, and influence, of Mike Devlin, a middle-aged white psychiatrist who runs a tae kwon do school in a volatile black Baltimore neighborhood. A street tough named ``Trig,'' Sharmane, his sometime girlfriend and mother of his baby, along with several of their cohorts offer grim variant perspectives on an omniscient narrative that's told in flashback and in chapters numbered in reverse order, as in a countdown. It's the story of Devlin's divided life, ministering to the depressed and neurotic children of wealthy white parents (like the murderous eight-year-old ``sentenced to therapy for executing and mutilating the family cat'') while moonlighting as a martial-arts student and as a teacher who enlists the rootless black kids around him as his own students. The premise is just barely believable, and Bell gets much less mileage out of his account of Mike Devlin's hunger to ``do some good'' than in the novel's looser, less theme-driven moments. Scenes with his young psychiatric patients are especially compelling, and there's both tension and passion in Devlin's moments with his weary wife Alice and feisty daughter Michelle—whose involvement, however, both in the Oriental discipline that absorbs her father and in a clandestine relationship with one of his pupils tempts Bell into his old bad habit of locating meaning in climactic melodrama. Everything is shaped—much too schematically—toward a conclusion that proves the truth of Sharmane's phlegmatic pronouncement: ``Devlin rules work good inside of the school . . . but you get it on the street it don't mean nothing no more.'' Little happens, or is suggested, here that most readers won't anticipate. The novel packs some of Bell's inner-city grit and power, but he has done, and can do, better than this. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44246-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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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