Broken relationships and damaging silences, presented from deliberately misleading angles, add up to a readable, clever,...
A tricky tale of deceptions—some well-meant—and infidelities winds together an attractive woman’s fractured love life and an open-hearted man’s intense attachment to a child.
Passions run deep in noted British writer Samson’s U.S. debut, a novel which opens with the brutal end of Julia's marriage to Chris and her escape into the arms of her younger lover, gifted literature student Julian. Julian will drop out of college to support Julia when they discover she's pregnant, though a miscarriage follows. Julian’s subsequent life as a writer, Julia’s as a landscape designer, their move to an idyllic cottage called Firdaws where Julian spent his childhood, the birth of their daughter, Mira, and the child's sudden, terrible illness are just a few of the ensuing events, narrated by Samson in four acts spanning 23 years and conveyed from various perspectives. While the first and last sections are brief, the middle two are expansive, the second verging on baggy, allowing the author ample space for a looping narrative that repeatedly tantalizes the reader about events and expectations, moving back and forth within the story’s timeline and delivering the facts in sly drips at unexpected intervals. The technique is provocative, as are some of the plot swerves—a car crash; a withdrawal into silence for many years; an assumption of adultery—all of which play crucial roles. With its sensuous prose and blend of romance, disappointment, amazing sex, and exquisite domestic interiors, the novel hovers somewhere between conventional commercial fiction and something rather more ambitious.
Broken relationships and damaging silences, presented from deliberately misleading angles, add up to a readable, clever, teasing, but naggingly overcomplicated story.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63286-067-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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