At a rough time for masculinity, Russo's flawed but always decent characters are repositories of the classic virtues of...
A reunion on Martha's Vineyard reopens old mysteries and wounds for three Vietnam-era college friends.
Russo's (The Destiny Thief, 2018, etc.) 14th book blends everything we love about this author with something new. Yes, this is a novel about male friendship, fathers and sons, small-town class issues, and lifelong crushes, and it provides the familiar pleasure of immersion in the author's distinctive, richly observed world and his inimitable ironic voice. But this is also a mystery about a 1971 cold case. At the center of it is one of Russo's impossibly magical women, one Jacy Rockafellow, who graduated Minerva College in Connecticut that year with three "hashers"—scholarship students who worked in the dining hall of her sorority and were also her closest friends. Mickey is the son of a West Haven construction worker, Teddy the offspring of Midwestern high school teachers, and Lincoln comes from Dunbar, Arizona, the only child of a tiny tyrant named Wolfgang Amadeus Moser—Dub Yay to his friends—and his downtrodden, docile wife, Trudy. Dub Yay announces that in order for Lincoln to go to college at a small East Coast liberal arts school, he, Dub Yay, would have to be dead. "A statement that was clearly designed to end this conversation, so Lincoln was surprised to see on his mother's face an unfamiliar expression that suggested she'd contemplated her husband's mortality with equanimity and was undeterred." Vintage Russo. All three boys are head over heels in love with Jacy, who is engaged to someone named Vance, Chance, or Lance, whom she seems to care about not a whit. Midway through their college years, the draft lottery occurs; one of the boys gets a very low number and is certain to be called up. A farewell weekend at Lincoln's mother's beach house on Martha's Vineyard turns out to be the last time Jacy is ever seen or heard of. When the three boys reunite there as 66-year-old men, they can't think of anything but her; cherchez la femme. No one understands men better than Russo, and no one is more eloquent in explaining how they think, suffer, and love.
At a rough time for masculinity, Russo's flawed but always decent characters are repositories of the classic virtues of their gender.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94774-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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