Next book

GET A LIFE

One of our great writers at her challenging, blistering best. Mandatory reading.

The 1991 Nobel winner’s 14th novel is one of her most provocative books: an unsparing analysis of the permutations—and ramifications—of commitment and fidelity, endangerment and survival.

Its initial crisis is the personal one afflicting 30ish white South African Paul Bannerman, an ecologist dedicated to protecting the pristine African environment from commercial overdevelopment. Diagnosed with malignant thyroid cancer, Bannerman is treated with a “destructive [chemical] substance” that renders him temporarily radioactive, removing him from contact with his wife Berenice (“Benni”) and young son and placing him under a kind of benign house arrest in the home of his still-nurturing parents Lyndsay and Adrian. Gordimer employs this confinement as a stage for revelations of her major characters’ contrasted and intertwined professional and personal lives. Benni is a successful advertising copywriter, whose clients include commercial enterprises her husband opposes. Paul’s father Adrian is a retired businessman with a passion for archaeology left unrequited during the early years of his long marriage to Lyndsay, who is still, in her 60s, a busy civil-rights lawyer. Gordimer has a tendency to tip her hand, and spell out themes (e.g., Benni’s lament “why must her man take on the survival of the whole bloody world, and now himself a threatened species?”). But her terse, slashing prose compels attention, and she shares Saul Bellow’s ability to make discursive commentary vividly dramatic. And as the novel’s initially simple plot cunningly exfoliates, Paul’s re-entry into the world of family and work encounters ironic complications, as does his parents’ seemingly rock-like marriage, which endures separation, failed communication and—in an irony worthy of Sophocles—Lyndsay’s accession to a judgeship. Yes, this is a talky novel, but if the conscience of South Africa hasn’t earned the right to have her say, who has?

One of our great writers at her challenging, blistering best. Mandatory reading.

Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2005

ISBN: 0-374-16170-4

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005

Categories:
Next book

CONCLAVE

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

Next book

THE SECRET HISTORY

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

Categories:
Close Quickview