Less heavy breathing than one might expect, though still a trifle overwrought.
Gay angst at summer camp in Lowenthal’s second (after The Same Embrace, 1998).
Jeremy Stull makes a habit of investigating strange worlds. From an ordinary suburban family in northeastern Maryland, he has drifted farther and farther from the Beltway, both geographically and psychologically. As a boy, he went to a summer camp called Ironwood in the wilds of Vermont. Later, he enrolled as a graduate student at Harvard and went to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to study the Amish communities. Rootless and disconnected from his family, Jeremy admires the social cohesion of the Amish, who depend upon the fellowship of their congregations for protection from the larger world. The closest comparable sense of belonging Jeremy ever had was at Camp Ironwood, where he still spends his summers, but now as a counselor. This year, however, Ironwood isn’t quite the same. A strange boy in Jeremy’s group named Max has an air of mystery about him. A New Yorker, Max comes from a broken family and lives with his grandparents. He has that cheap sophistication that Jeremy associates with city kids, but there’s a vulnerable side to him—which becomes more pronounced when Jeremy discovers that much of Max’s history is a fiction (right down to his name). Long before Jeremy unravels Max’s secrets, it’s apparent he’s in love with the boy, but the ensuing trouble isn’t quite what you would expect. Jeremy discovers that another counselor is abusing the campers, using drugs as an inducement, and Max is implicated. The scandal is dealt with, and Max seems to take it in stride, but Jeremy—who never laid a finger on him—is shaken all the same. “Do you understand?” he asks Max. “I wanted to. I still do.” Sometimes, it seems, the fantasy can be as real (and as disturbing) as the deed.
Less heavy breathing than one might expect, though still a trifle overwrought.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-55597-367-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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