Prose pretty much stripped of graces remains useful for this unpretentious, involving story told with unfaltering authority.
A heartfelt debut in which a Montana ranch family battles both Mother Nature and human nature.
It’s punishing country, southeastern Montana: choking dust-storms, killer droughts, merciless winters, and a population that puts on pessimism like an extra layer of clothing. Sensing he’s in danger of becoming typical, young Blake Arbuckle fights against it, wants something better for himself but has no real idea what it might be. The time is the early part of the 20th century, and when we meet the Arbuckles (loosely based on the author's grandparents) they’re attempting to cope with the tragic drowning of Blake’s older brother George. But it’s worse than that. The excruciating thing, the thing that brings despair chillingly close, is the growing sense among the family that the death might not have been accidental. Jack, the oldest brother, who was with George when he died, is undeniably shaken by what happened, by whatever it was that happened, but enigmatic Jack is hard to read. And it’s a given that there was little love lost between the two brothers. With everything still unresolved, Jack suddenly disappears—without explanation. And then, months later, just as suddenly, he reappears. He’d enlisted in the AEF, he tells the bewildered Arbuckles, been shipped overseas to France, wounded there, and now, a civilian again, has a brand-new wife he wants the family to meet. Rita is sweet-natured and pretty, and the Arbuckles are warmly welcoming. As for Blake, he’s overwhelmed, “engulfed” by her. For unsophisticated, bone-loyal Blake—a portrait rendered with particular sympathy—that simply means he’s hers forever. All the portraits are convincingly drawn: the silent, drudgery-shaped father, the indomitable mother, the often contentious brothers—Blake aside—and, most vividly, the bleak, cruel land, making incessant and impossible demands on those who love it despite themselves.
Prose pretty much stripped of graces remains useful for this unpretentious, involving story told with unfaltering authority.Pub Date: June 7, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-008434-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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