Harvey squeezes some pathos out of Jake’s condition, but not much else.
A limp first novel from English author Harvey that moves back and forth between an Alzheimer’s patient’s past and present.
Jake Jameson experienced “his first true blankness” the day his wife died. They were both middle-aged when Helen was felled by a stroke and Jake was flummoxed what to do next. The couple had married young, in London, but Jake, an architect, had wanted to return to his native Lincolnshire to be close to his widowed mother Sara. They had two children. Their son Henry went to pieces after his mother died, drinking and stealing; now he’s doing time in the prison his father designed. Daughter Alice died when she was still a child. The circumstances are never made clear, and this is one of the novel’s major problems. Harvey chooses to write around events. Like Alice’s death, Helen’s death and Henry’s breakdown are not described directly, thus adding to the fog of Jake’s dementia. Perhaps Harvey is suggesting that the disorder of Alzheimer’s is the disorder of life writ large. At the heart of the novel are Jake’s relationships with four women: his mother, his wife, Joy and Eleanor. Joy is a young woman the married Jake met just once. They made love, whereupon Joy left for America, and they began a long correspondence, “the most honest thing” in Jake’s life. (The letters may be Jake’s fantasy, a poorly executed narrative trick.) As for poor Eleanor, Jake’s childhood playmate, she has loved Jake all her life and winds up as his caregiver and bed partner of last resort. There is certainly disorder in all this, though with a dash of contrivance; even Jake’s marriage to Helen, apparently a good one, may have been impaired “because there is no darkness in her.” Looming largest in Jake’s ultimate darkness are a gunshot and the color yellow, legacies of that tryst with Joy.
Harvey squeezes some pathos out of Jake’s condition, but not much else.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52763-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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
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
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