A lot more fun than it probably deserves to be.
A wild, pornographic, funny, postmodern rant that, like most from Coover lately (Ghost Town, 1998, etc.), adds up to something less than the sum of its parts.
In the tradition of Tristram Shandy or Finnegan’s Wake, this is a story that can be opened at any point and read at length with great pleasure—though it somehow can’t come together as a single and complete work. It introduces us to the life and times of Lucky Pierre, a legendary porn star known to and admired by all the citizens of Cinecity, the frozen capital of some unnamed utopian world of endless sexual gratification. Pierre is more than a celebrity: he is one of the guiding lights and elder statesmen of Cinecity, on close terms with the mayor and the rest of the town mothers and fathers. There’s no semblance of a developing linear narrative, so best may be simply to touch on the brighter elements of the story. Pierre has nine muses (Cecilia, Cleo, Clara, Cassandra, Constance, Carlotta, Cora, Catherine, and Calliope) who direct his films and create elaborate sexual worlds for him to perform in. He is a man of many personae, taking on variously the character of a smutty cartoon, submissive slave, dirty officemate, naughty little boy, helpless castaway, sex machine, outlaw, or bored suburban husband. The scenarios are about as coherent as actual porn films—that is, not coherent at all but simply serving as the pretexts for extended (and admittedly pretty amusing) sexual intercourse. There is, for example, an extremely funny scene involving female medical students, a lecture hall, a gurney, and a buxom professor who demonstrates to her audience how the proper stimulation of Pierre’s—well, you get the point. After a while, you can easily get lost in the subject.
A lot more fun than it probably deserves to be.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8021-1724-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
