A gorgeous, articulate novel that is at once an unflinching meditation on degradation and a paean to deliverance.
Gaitskill, whose story “Secretary” was made into a 2002 film of the same name, returns with this ravishing novel about a friendship between a young fashion model and an unattractive older woman dying of AIDS.
Alison Owen is a 36-year-old former runway model now enduring the consequences of her teenage debut in the fashion industry. She occasionally works as a cleaning woman, but mostly lives on disability—the result of an auto accident that brought the last phase of her diminishing career to an end. Insomnia, the codeine she takes to relieve the chronic pain of her ruined rotator cuff and recurrent fevers (symptoms of advancing hepatitis-C) combine to transform her waking consciousness into a lush kaleidoscope of memory: international fashion shoots; her Parisian chauffeur-lover, René; the paranoid agency head, Alain, who took her as his mistress and then absconded with her Swiss bank account; her mother’s deathbed; her father’s anguish while listening to Rigoletto; the catalogue agent who raped her at 17; Jersey boys from her hometown; a naked man on a leash in an S&M club; her Jay McInerney–like boyfriend in New York’s booming ’80s social scene. But most of all, she remembers Veronica, the abrasive older woman she met against the backdrop of a Manhattan that was just learning about AIDS (and still believing women were immune). Veronica, who reacts dispassionately to Alison’s confessions of her past, is an unerring proofreader (her motto: “Still Anal After All These Years”)—one of the army of over-educated clerical workers who mine the night shifts of law firms and big business to fund their screw-the-system lives. Her friends are all literate gay men; her bisexual lover is Duncan, who eventually succumbs to AIDS. Veronica and Alison were not lovers, hardly even friends, but they haunted each other, and somehow, as Gaitskill devastatingly illustrates, they made each other whole.
A gorgeous, articulate novel that is at once an unflinching meditation on degradation and a paean to deliverance.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42145-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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