Spare, resonant, unputdownable.
A gripping environmental drama pits the rescue of a drowned child against the integrity of a river.
Narrator Maggie Glenn works for a newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina. The 28-year-old photographer was born and raised in Tamassee, in the mountains to the west, and she’s assigned, along with star reporter Allen Hemphill, to cover a big story in her hometown. Three weeks earlier, 12-year-old Ruth Kowalsky had been sucked into a whirlpool in the Tamassee River; county divers have failed to dislodge her body from the rock where it lies trapped. Ruth’s father Herb, a powerful banker from Minnesota, wants to make the divers’ job easier by erecting a portable dam to divert the water flow. One problem: Erection means drilling holes into the bedrock, and federal law protects the river from any violation of its natural state. Storywriter and second-novelist Rash (One Foot in Eden, not reviewed) sets up a finely balanced confrontation between Luke Miller, fearless and incorruptible champion of the river (though no saint), and Ruth’s grieving parents, who want to give her a proper burial. Uncomfortably in the middle is the district ranger. Back in Tamassee, Maggie has more on her mind than her job. She has been estranged from her father ever since her brother Ben and she were badly burned in a childhood accident for which the old man was responsible. Now he’s dying of cancer. Can Maggie make peace with him, as her more forgiving brother did years ago? On the job, she takes a haunting photograph of the despondent Herb Kowalsky. Along with Hemphill’s reporting, it helps tip the balance in favor of the temporary dam. Luke, her ex-lover and mentor, is furious, and Maggie herself, secretly on his side, regrets taking it. But the suspense isn’t over. The river is rising. Will the dam hold long enough for the divers to retrieve the girl?
Spare, resonant, unputdownable.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7487-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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