The novel shines with a kind of beatnik deference to drugs and lust and dangerous youth.
San Francisco hipster-girl Tea pens a novel of teenage angst.
Fourteen-year-old Trisha is a self-described loner, though that may be putting a positive spin on friendlessness. Her life in small-town Massachusetts is bleak: Trisha’s mother is a shut-in, having spent the best chunk of Trisha’s life lying on the couch, watching TV, fretting over imaginary illnesses. Her older sister Kristy has just finished cosmetology training at the vocational high school and is taping their home life so she can get on MTV’s The Real World (Trisha’s offended that she’s being portrayed as an alcoholic—what’s a few empty beer bottles by the bed?). Then there’s Ma’s boyfriend Donnie, a petty crook whose only redeeming quality is that he doesn’t molest the girls. The novel follows one crazy day in Trisha’s (up until now muted) life, beginning with a new job at the mall and ending with a tattooed portrait of her lesbian lover. With a bit of clever lying and borrowed clothes, Kristy finagles Trisha a job at clothing store Ohmigod!, filling in for teen queen Kim as she recovers from a suicide attempt. Trisha doesn’t quite fit in and is fired by the end of the day. But no matter, she’s befriended by Rose, a tough-talking, chain-smoking, shoplifting sprite of a girl who takes Trisha out for the night of her life. They hitchhike to Revere Beach where they score crystal meth from a pedophile dealer (the transaction requires a nude Polaroid of Rose as collateral against snitching), and as the two snort their way back home, they make out by the dinosaur at a miniature golf course, fish for change in the fountain at a Chinese restaurant and stop off at a tattoo parlor where Trisha commemorates the night with a tattoo of Rose on her arm. A big night for a 14-year-old. Although Trisha’s initial musings on life are tediously mundane, as soon as Rose enters the picture, the novel takes off in a blur of speedy bliss.
The novel shines with a kind of beatnik deference to drugs and lust and dangerous youth.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2006
ISBN: 1-59692-160-9
Page Count: 306
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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