Original but disappointing.
A narrative of disability and its consequences.
An author of science fiction, thrillers, and historical fiction, Griffith (Hild, 2013, etc.) defies easy categorization. So does her latest novel. It has some of the elements of crime fiction, but its shape does not conform to the genre’s norms. Romantic relationships play a significant role in the plot, but this is certainly not a romance novel. This is, more than anything, a story about disability and how it shapes—and reshapes—people’s lives. The narrative begins with Mara Tagarelli’s longtime partner, Rose, leaving her for another woman. When Mara turns to Aiyana, one of her oldest friends, for comfort, their relationship turns sexual. But Aiyana’s job is taking her to New Zealand, so Mara is alone when she discovers that she has multiple sclerosis. As both the illness and the side effects of drug therapy take their toll, Mara is forced to step down as executive director of a multimillion-dollar AIDS organization. Her experience in that space gives her tools for advocating for herself and other people with MS, but her failing body challenges Mara’s sense of herself. She’s used to being strong and self-reliant, and now she is weak and dependent. She doubts that anyone can really want her. She is prickly about Rose’s offers of help, and she assumes that Aiyana has lost interest. Then MS sufferers on a mailing list Mara has compiled become the victims of violence, and she suspects that the perpetrators might be working their way toward her. There are plenty of compelling themes here, and this might have been an excellent novel if it had been half again as long. But everything feels rushed. Mara’s reaction to her disease is raw and honest, but readers only see her as caustic and difficult. Unpleasant protagonists can be compelling, of course, but, here, it’s easier to understand why Rose and Aiyana would ditch Mara than to understand why they stick with her. And the element of mystery is introduced late and resolved before it generates any real tension.
Original but disappointing.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-26592-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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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