The author’s characteristic obsessiveness and attention to minutiae will appeal mainly to those who know and care as much...
Novelist/polemicist Baker (Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, 2008, etc.) takes a nullity as a protagonist.
Narrator Paul Chowder is a published poet of more renown than many. He has accepted a commission to compile and write the introduction for an anthology of rhymed verse entitled—perhaps with a nod toward E.M. Forster—Only Rhyme. Otherwise, Paul is defined by the nothingness of his life. Though the novel initially appears to concern his attempt to write the anthology introduction, it ultimately exhausts most of its narrative on his avoidance of writing it. Paul’s editor sends him threatening e-mails. His devoted girlfriend of eight years leaves him, exasperated. He can’t quite let her go, but he also can’t quite make himself write, or even start, that introduction. Instead, he cleans his office. He attempts to trap a mouse—ambivalently, for the rodent has become his major companion. He lays a floor for his neighbor. And he thinks so much about poetry and poets that it’s clear he could write the introduction at any point, if only he could find the proper tone and format. (He thinks maybe three or four sentences could pass, but the intro could just as easily balloon to more than 200 pages.) Despite his matter-of-fact composure and the chatty tone of his narrative, Paul is always on the verge of breaking down. He rails against the standard elevation of iambic pentameter in the poetic pantheon and builds his case for the four-beat line as all-American meter. He thinks of poets in an oddly chummy manner and holds imaginary conversations with the likes of “Ted” Roethke (“Whoa, Ted…Sounds a little like Dr. Seuss, except dark”). He reveals that he previously worked for a mutual fund and fled teaching in the middle of a semester, before turning to writing poetry—or not writing poetry, or not writing about poetry—full time.
The author’s characteristic obsessiveness and attention to minutiae will appeal mainly to those who know and care as much about poetry as Paul.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7244-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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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