Neither the pre-publication publicity nor Coover's exuberant word-riffs can conceal the tiny-mindedness behind this rewrite of early-1950s American history as comic-book mytho-fantasy. The "public burning" is the Ethel & Julius Rosenberg electrocution, here transformed into the Times Square vaudeville-rally that everyone—dodo Ike, "Boy Judge" Kaufman, prosecutor Saypol, and folksy, ballsy "Superhero" Uncle Sam himself—is bloodthirstily, Yahoo-istically waiting for. Justice Douglas' stay-of-execution creates a delay: time for the pinko servants of Sam's arch-enemy ("the Phantom!") to march and picket. And time for pathetic, paranoid Veep R. Nixon, who narrates every other chapter, to rehash the case; to detect parallels between the Rosenberg and Nixon family histories; to realize that "Eth" and "Julie" are "taking the rap for somebody else"; and to lose himself in masturbatory fantasies of earthy Ethel. As the execution-day gala commences—public spanking of Douglas, skits based on the Rosenberg Death House Letters by Astaire & Rogers, Jack Benny, the Marx Brothers—Nixon rushes to Sing-Sing for an erotic encounter with Ethel ("Richard, I could eat you in sheer extremity of feeling!"), tries to divert the the death-hungry Times Sq. horde ("everbody "drop his pants for America!"), precipitates an apocalyptic mob scene, and—after the electrocutions take place as scheduled—is initiated into America's power elite via sodomy by Uncle Sam: a "rendyvoos with destiny ain't no beanbag!" As a novella (the author's original intent), this ingenious scenario would flare, stun, and leave its mark. But Coover's inflationary technique—reduce to a one-liner and then free-associate, allude, and expand like crazy—belabors and betrays the essential gimcrack design. The tone of righteous sarcasm becomes a drone. Chunks of the public record are jazzily ornamented and tossed in. Juicy zingers about TIME and the N.Y. Times are whipped into the consistency of poured concrete. With no human moorings (for all the psycho-portraiture, RMN never graduates from gimmick to character), Coover skids between easy-target satire (Bruce, Sahl, et al. were there first) and melodramatic grandstanding, with no new insights worthy of his remarkable rhetorical talents. A provocative kernel lost in a dazzling, deadening morass: precisely the kind of book more likely to be talked about than read.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1977
ISBN: 0802135277
Page Count: 564
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1977
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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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