Assured, accomplished, and another intriguing change of pace from an adventurous writer who refuses to be pigeonholed.
A wonderfully varied third collection from Pulitzer-winner Butler (Fair Warning, 2002, etc.) investigates diverse lives—and deaths—early in the 20th century.
Each of these 15 stories opens with a reproduction of a vintage postcard, including its handwritten message, and from these often cryptic texts the author imagines an entire fictional world. Whether describing a hostile bellhop and an unhappy aristocrat (“Hotel Touraine”) or following a woman to France to visit her son at the WWI battlefront (“Mother in the Trenches”), Butler faultlessly captures the plainspoken, springy cadences of American speech a hundred years ago. It’s a quieter time than our own, though no less complicated. In 1914, an American journalist covering the US occupation of Vera Cruz walks by corpses without a thought (“My business is getting stories. You’re dead, and your story’s over”) but is brought up short by his laundress, “The One in White,” who scorns his feeble excuse that the Marines are here to liberate her country, pointing out that all the dead are Mexicans. “Hiram the Desperado” terrorizes his classmates and swaggers with 12-year-old toughness, but he’s still naive enough to miss the fact that the unmarried schoolteacher he has a crush on is pregnant. Death haunts every tale: young husbands die of TB, aviators crash their fledgling planes, a 48-year-old man dies of a heart attack while reading the Sunday New York Times at Coney Island. Yet there’s delightful humor in stories like “The Ironworkers’ Hayride,” where an absurdly self-conscious narrator meets his match in a self-confident beauty with a wooden leg; or in “I Got Married to Milk Can,” about a new bride renouncing her romantic dreams of running off with an artist when he proves to be an “advanced” painter of the Ash Can school. There’s plenty of sorrow, but plenty of exhilaration too, thanks to these characters’ grit and full-bodied humanity.
Assured, accomplished, and another intriguing change of pace from an adventurous writer who refuses to be pigeonholed.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1777-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© 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.
