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THE VOLUNTEER

Name: THE VOLUNTEER
Author: Salvatore Scibona
ISBN: 978-0-525-55852-1

by Salvatore Scibona ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2019

A touch overlong and sometimes perplexing but original and memorable.

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A soldier who goes off to war returns, but the war continues for generations to come.

The child is father to the man. But who is the child’s father, and what are the true names and identities of both father and son? Scibona (The End, 2008) delivers an enigmatic story that hinges on secrecy and uncertainty. Vollie Frade, befitting his name, joins the Marine Corps at the height of the Vietnam War, forging his father’s signature because he’s still a minor, shocking his mother, who says resignedly, “I’m surprised they let a person just take himself away like that.” With that, Vollie is off to a place in which he will experience all the customary hells of war but where he will also shed one identity to take another. “He kept on unaccountably not getting killed,” writes Scibona, but odd bits of metal and ugly misadventures find him anyway—and so does a spook named Lorch, a specialist in the “more modern intelligence function of covert operations,” who instructs Vollie that although he had been in Cambodia, he really hadn’t, because Congress had passed a law against crossing into Cambodia: “Ergo you were not.” Equipped with a new name and job, Vollie roams a world in which meaning is resolutely unfixed. He acquires a wife and son along the way, and happiness does not ensue; the mood turns to Carver territory, punctuated by occasional improbabilities more suited to Pynchon, leading up to a spasm of violence that’s unexpected but perfectly appropriate. As with his first novel, with which it has thematic similarities, Scibona’s story takes in a broad sweep of time, looking into the future to foresee an end that may not be so terrible but that is just as certain. The plot sometimes threatens to come off the rails, but throughout, the narrative is marked by distinctive lyricism and striking images: “They were standing on a street corner in 1973. The sun fell everywhere like a terrible shower, and they cast no shadows.”

A touch overlong and sometimes perplexing but original and memorable.

Pub Date: March 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-525-55852-1

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.