The author of the well-received first novel Mohawk (1986), a long soap opera set in a decaying mill town in upstate New York, here returns to that setting with a father-son drama that spans several decades. With an unerring sense of place, the book transcends some soapiness of its own and breathes life into its small-town types. Ned Hall tells the story of his father Sam, who is at the very bottom of the autoinsurance risk pool; of his mother Jenny, who breaks down after her lover, a priest, leaves her at the communion rail; and of the assorted citizens of Mohawk, ranging from suicidal adolescents and battered drunks to well-to-do philanderers and a solicitous attorney. Sam is the most memorable character, a classic rogue and no-account who appears in his son's life at will until Jenny breaks down. Ned moves in with his father and receives a young man's classic education into street life in the 50's: he learns how to play pool, how to bet the horses, how to steal and lie—partly from malice and hurt, partly to please others. He witnesses endless fights between his father and Drew, the son of his father's girlfriend. He falls in love with the well-to-do girl on the hill and returns, years later, to become her lover and his father's buddy before leaving again. Drew gets killed, Jenny moves to California with the solicitous lawyer, and Sam gets cancer. Though the book gets baggy with too many long-winded stories about smalltown eccentrics and grotesques, its ending is a powerful epiphany, if a bit forced: Ned's girl has a child at the same time as Sam dies. The seasonal structure here comes full circle. Self-consciously written as an old-fashioned novel, the book creates a time and place with gusto and, by its end, manages to move us.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1988
ISBN: 0679753834
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1988
A fiercely written, deeply upsetting, and beautifully human novel.
The brutal murder of a 15-year-old boy during the 1980 Gwangju Uprising becomes the connective tissue between the isolated characters of this emotionally harrowing novel.
In May 1980, student demonstrations ignited a popular uprising in the South Korean city of Gwangju. The police and military responded with ruthless violence, and Han (The Vegetarian, 2015) begins her novel in the middle of a disorienting atmosphere of human-inflicted horror. While searching for a friend, a young boy named Dong-ho joins a team of volunteers who look after the bodies of demonstrators who were killed. He keeps a ledger with details on each corpse, pins a number to its chest, and keeps candles lit beside the ones with no family to grieve beside them. The details of this world seep off the page in a series of sickening but precisely composed images. Han’s evocation of savagery and grief is shockingly sensory and visceral but never approximate or unrestrained. Each character’s voice seems to ring in its own space, and though they are all connected by Dong-ho’s experiences in Gwangju, they exist in an uncanny isolation. The novel is divided into seven parts: six acts that each focus on a different character and an epilogue that pulls in the author herself. The parts shift in time from 1980 to 2013 and in point of view, making the reader intimate or complicit to different degrees with the voice of a dead person, a survivor of torture, a mother suffering from regret and memory. Han explores the sprawling trauma of political brutality with impressive nuance and the piercing emotional truth that comes with masterful fiction. In her epilogue she writes, “Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke.” Her novel is likely to provoke an echo of that moment in its readers.
A fiercely written, deeply upsetting, and beautifully human novel.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90672-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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
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