The most compelling fiction from Amis in more than a decade.
A novel that doesn’t read like any other, ranking as this renowned British author’s best.
Inside the provocative, philosophical, acerbic Amis (Yellow Dog, 2003, etc.), there has long seemed to be a Russian novelist straining to break out. Here, then, is Amis’s contemporary version of a classic Russian novel, with references to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy (as well as a totalitarian allegory along the lines of Orwell’s Animal Farm). Though not epic in length, the narrative sees World War II, its dictatorial aftermath and the distinctions between East and West, and good and evil, through the memory of an 86-year-old Russian whose life was transformed by his 14-year enslavement in the Gulag. He feels that he must make a pilgrimage to the camp, for it was there that he was reunited with his brother and learned that his brother had married the woman they both loved (or at least lusted after). As described by the narrator, this Jewish woman, Zoya, is so great a caricature of such sexual abundance that she seems the literary equivalent of Jessica Rabbit, though it’s one of the narrator’s peculiarities that he is more prone to objectifying rather than humanizing, and not only in his relationships with women. The first-person memoir (or confession) confirms Amis’s mastery of tone and the ambiguities of character, as the narrator addresses his recollection to his thoroughly Westernized daughter, revealing secrets a father should never share. (It’s telling that the narrator and his daughter both have ties to Chicago, which serves as a backdrop and is so strongly associated with Amis’s literary mentor, Saul Bellow.) Though the novel never succumbs to overbearing polemics, it nevertheless provides a socio-cultural critique of the past six decades, as dehumanized violence and subverted desires threaten to crush the human spirit and the emergence of a “Fourth World” throws everything up for grabs. In the process, the novel sustains the narrative momentum of a mystery, though it seems that some mysteries can never be solved.
The most compelling fiction from Amis in more than a decade.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-4455-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
IN THE NEWS
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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