A consistently accomplished debut that’s still hard to take because the family’s anguish seems too little distinguished from...
Ten years after the fall of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, his legal counsel, Roy Cohn, is still unwillingly claiming victims—in this first novel of a family turned inside out by their loyalty to Cohn.
Invited to give off-the-record testimony against his longtime friend in Cohn’s conspiracy case, New Jersey toymaking executive Will Clemens politely declined. His loyalty won him a subpoena, and by 1964 the misdemeanor to which he confidently pled guilty has led to a one-year sentence in the federal pen at Woeburne, New York. No sooner has the door slammed shut on Will than he finds that Cohn can’t deliver on his promises of special treatment: there’ll be no segregation from the general prison population, no extra TV or visitation privileges. And when Will declines another invitation, this time to sex with a willing young thing who’s been smuggled onto his work detail, he’s beaten for his trouble. Meanwhile, the family he left outside is having problems of its own. His numbed wife Kay, unable to resist the matter-of-fact advances of their neighbor, keeps darting back into Cohn’s orbit to disconcertingly little effect. His little boy Bo, ravaged by cancer, is living in a world bounded by hospital walls. His teenaged daughter Lou-Lou, largely sidelined to the care of her mother’s ravisher and his wife, is the only family member who seems able to think about the Clemenses as a going concern. Unfortunately for both Will and the novel, the malaise of splintered relationships and missed connections is epidemic, as Hughes shows in a series of tableaux bringing Cohn and his circle to melancholy, sympathetic, but ineffectual life as their little cosmos seems to be holding its collective breath waiting for the worst.
A consistently accomplished debut that’s still hard to take because the family’s anguish seems too little distinguished from the general social funk to provide much narrative energy.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-835-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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