Hard on the heels of Theft (1989), another Bellow 100-pager in paperback original: this time the tale of one Harry Fonstein, saved from the Holocaust by the underground organization of Broadway impresario Billy Rose (Bellarosa, to the wartime Italians), then later cold-shouldered by the show-biz celeb himself. Having fled the Nazis from Poland to Italy, Fonstein finds himself mysteriously wafted from a Rome jail cell to end up, by a subtle and devious route, endowed with an American wife named Sorella (overweight, a teacher of French) and living successfully as a businessman in New Jersey. Naturally enough, Fonstein wants to meet Billy Rose and express his gratitude ("I owe him my life"), but his calls aren't answered, he's turned away at the office, and once—at Sardi's—he's forcibly prevented from approaching the man himself. Fonstein may or may not be resigned to such unnatural rebuffs, but his persistent wife Sorella certainly isn't. In 1959, she and Fonstein are vacationing in Jerusalem when the rich and famous Billy Rose is there also—dedicating a memorial garden. The obese but passionate Sorella has brought with her the wildly incriminating secret diaries of a disgruntled (and deceased) staff member of Rose's—with which she confronts him, threatening publication if he won't agree "to sit down with my husband for fifteen minutes." Result? No go. Billy Rose won't budge ("Remember, forget—what's the difference to me?"). A moment of laugh-aloud comedy ensues, yet nothing changes: Rose won't see Fonstein, people's lives go on. The narrator of the story—a shirttail relative of Fonstein's who has become rich by running a memory institute in Philadelphia—tries to get back in touch with Fonstein and Sorella 30 years later, casting doubt on his own thesis that "memory is life" and peering into an abyss that the high-rolling Billy Rose ("Tiny, greedy, smart") just may have seen long before him. Subtle, complex, and tricky, a wry-toned look deep into gloom: fine, vintage Bellow in the shorter form.
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1989
ISBN: 0140126864
Page Count: -
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1989
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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