A bleak tale told bluntly with an abundance of profanity but also of insight into two kinds of living hell.
In this unsettling debut, a young man raised in the middle-class comforts of America encounters war, love, and drug addiction.
After the narrator awakens on the first page, he is “looking for a shirt with no blood on it” and then for his rigs—the apparatus of heroin addiction—to get him and his partner, Emily, in shape for the day. She has to be at school by 10 a.m. to teach college students remedial writing. The two met at 18 and now they are 25, living in a Cleveland suburb. Walker opens and closes the story in the couples’ present at age 25, while the bulk looks back at how the unnamed narrator found Emily and lost her and went off to war in Iraq in 2005. The writing is raw, coarse, and sometimes forced: “Your new friends would eat the eyes out of your head for a spoon.” Yet it often has a brute power, tapping the unadorned, pointedly repetitive language of addiction or battle. The IED “took off both Jimenez’s legs and severed one of his arms almost completely. But he was still awake and he knew what was happening. He was screaming.” So many patrols deal with bombs or breaking into suspect houses: “Just IEDs. Just kicking doors. More IEDs. More doors.” Soldiers look for distraction. Two of them make snuff films with mice. Some do drugs because the Army stops checking urine. On his release from the Army, the narrator reconnects with Emily and copes with PTSD. “In these years I didn’t sleep and when I slept I dreamt of violence.” Heroin takes over, with its own awful monotony. They are “spending over a thousand dollars on dope, every week.” She keeps teaching. He robs banks.
A bleak tale told bluntly with an abundance of profanity but also of insight into two kinds of living hell.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52013-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK TO SCREEN
Nico Walker’s Cherry Being Filmed in Cleveland
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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