HERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN

Name: HERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN
Author: Rob Doyle
ISBN: 978-1-63286-190-0

by Rob Doyle ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2015

Rough in its language, physical violence, and reminders of youth’s potential for anything, the book joins a respectable...

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In 2003, amid boom times in Ireland, three teenagers spend the summer high on everything but life in this intense, at times nightmarish, debut.

Kearney daydreams of sick bloody mayhem, while bookish Rez sees through every facade to the pointlessness behind. Matthew is desperate for a girlfriend and destined to flop. They’re friends who have spent their last school year before college or work making trouble and getting themselves barred from their graduation ceremony. Jobless yet clearly riding the Celtic Tiger, they always have money to finance the “inevitable” idea of getting wasted. Day and night they drink and smoke pot or hash in truly striking quantities, with occasional detours for cocaine or Ecstasy. Vomit and most other bodily emissions are never far away, either from the main characters or any one of the junkies, drunkards, and street people strewn about Dublin’s fair city. While there are many darkly comic moments—a junkie’s volume of poetry is called “Molesting Your Inner Child”—the book isn’t for the squeamish, especially with regard to Kearney’s more extreme fantasies and three sickening deaths. The young men’s mischief takes an inevitable uglier turn when Kearney’s beating of a junkie leads to worse. Doyle’s take on the angst and awkward bonding of young males is strong enough that it highlights how little he has on the female side, essentially one solid but unexplored character. Still, he skillfully stokes suspense amid considerable repetition and makes these nasty slackers occasionally even elicit sympathy. He also makes sure they’re not stupid, which highlights the fact that their choices are. For many parents this could be an eye-opening, admonitory read—if they aren’t as unbelievably blind as the parents in the book.

Rough in its language, physical violence, and reminders of youth’s potential for anything, the book joins a respectable literary line dating back to A Clockwork Orange, if not Tom Jones and Vanity Fair.

Pub Date: June 16, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-63286-190-0

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.