Needs a shot of adrenaline.
A middle-aged woman who can’t seem to get her life in focus realizes the past is bogging her down—in this melancholy new novel by Morris, a superb travel writer (Angels and Aliens, 1998, etc.) whose fictional achievements continue to be erratic.
When an invitation to her 30th high-school reunion reaches her, Tess Winterstone is divorced and living listlessly in a house hanging precariously over the central California coast. Her children, Ted and Jade—chronologically adult, but as incapable as their mother of making a commitment to work or school—decide the reunion would do Tess good and bundle her onto a plane for Chicago, where she visits her ailing, embittered mother before driving north to Winonah, Illinois. There, at a bar owned by her former boyfriend, Patrick, Tess makes uncomfortable contact with childhood friend/nemesis Margaret, who stole Patrick from her and is now married to wealthy Nick, a onetime football star. Morris intersperses Tess’s memories of youth in Winonah with an account of her romance with Nick, problems with her kids, and economic woes, which include a home that’s going to fall into Monterey Bay if she can’t get financing and cheaper insurance by having it placed on the National Register of Historic Houses. (It was built by a famous poet.) Both narratives make it clear that Tess has unfinished business with Margaret, who’s drinking heavily and in precarious mental health. Later, Margaret’s suicide sends Tess into a near-catatonic depression that doesn’t seem very different from her previous state of passive confusion, and the epiphany that restores her is too muddily explicated to be convincing. Morris has a winning way with metaphor, particularly the exemplification of life’s myriad uncertainties in the comments of Tess’s insurance-salesman father (“acts of God” is a policy clause as well as an existential force here); her prose is subtle, her storytelling solid. But the novel’s merits are sucked into the black hole created by her low-energy heroine.
Needs a shot of adrenaline.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-24663-3
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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 novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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