Is it possible that Portnoy's Complaint will some day be remembered only as the book that made Philip Roth famous enough to afford to write great, quiet novellas later on? Perhaps—because The Professor of Desire (1977) was the best Roth in years, and The Ghost Writer is even shorter and even better. The theme, beautifully twisting through three twirled narrative threads, is the artist's conflict between the obsessive demands of his calling and the separate but equal demands of family, of human contact. Famous New England/Jewish writer E. I. Lonoff, for instance, has surrendered wholeheartedly to the obsession; he's lordly, wise, funny, and noble (he quietly declined a National Book Award)—but he's been driving his well-bred wife crazy with decade after decade of gentle, helpless, selfish inhumanities. And our narrator, just-beginning writer Nathan Zuckerman, comes upon the Lonoffs at their most genteel-ly violent: he has been invited to dinner to meet and commune with his idol at the isolated Lonoff home in the Berkshires, and his visit (plus Lonoff's attentions toward Amy, a bright, lovely, and apparently disturbed co-ed who's in residence to catalogue Lonoff's work) sets off flurries of domestic anguish. But Nathan also has his own human/literary bind to brood upon, and he does so while staying overnight at the Lonoffs': he has written a true-to-life story—about family bickering over an inheritance—that is an embarrassment, a torture to his New Jersey-Jewish (but distinctly uncaricatured) father; the ensuing father/son dialogue (while standing on the street waiting for a bus) is as nakedly painful as anything Roth has written, quickly followed by Roth at his angry/funniest—as a pompous Jewish community leader joins the fray over the story with "Ten Questions for Nathan Zuckerman." And there's one more variation on the writer/family theme: during that same night Nathan concocts a fantasy about mysterious Amy—she is (or believes herself to be) the Anne Frank, longing to reveal herself to her grieving father but hesitating because a living Anne would rob her diary of its literary impact. Roth underlines none of this elegant theme-weaving, letting it all emerge through dazzling dialogue and his most understated, almost folktale-like prose. (Nathan describes another, flashier famous writer he has met—"He was like California itself—to get there you had to take a plane.") Elegantly floating and at the same time firmly grounded to home and heart—a sonata-like masterwork.
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1979
ISBN: 0679748989
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
PERSPECTIVES
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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