Sophisticated pleasures and a grown-up love story from the estimable Hoban.
A quick, droll, pleasantly amusing love story set in London around about now.
Max Lesser—like his creator, Hoban (Angelica’s Grotto, 2001, etc.)—is a novelist and children’s book writer (Max’s novels don’t sell, though his series about a hedgehog, Charlotte Prickles, does very well), but, seemingly unlike Hoban, he’s blocked, long since unable to get “anything that looks like Page One of a new novel” or to get a new hedgehog idea. Then? Well, through the mail slot comes an anonymous CD with a raga on it—and, after Max plays it, things get curiouser and curiouser. Max has a kind of blackout on his way to a lunch date, then is more or less assaulted by an ugly and smelly dwarf who’s groveling almost animal-like on the pavement: this dwarf leaps onto Max’s back and flattens himself there, tangible and visible to poor Max but not to others. What is he? A visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum and a statue there of Shiva reveals that the dwarf, held down under Shiva’s foot (the weight disappears from Max’s back as the dwarf slips back under the foot), is Apasmara Purusha, the “dwarf demon called Forgetfulness.” Another visit, this time to a kind of prophetess named Grace Kowalski, who’s aided by much vodka and another playing of the raga, at last reveals to Max who sent him the CD: Lola Bessington! The reader may be a bit confused as to how Max could ever have forgotten the wonderful Lola, or what her motive really was in sending the raga (she composed the music herself), but there’s no confusion at all as bit by bit Max re-remembers Lola, how much they loved each other, and then the awful, awful, contemptible thing he did to her that ended all—until now, and their near-miraculous, no, their miraculous reunion.
Sophisticated pleasures and a grown-up love story from the estimable Hoban.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-55970-726-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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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