Darkly hilarious and weirdly beguiling.
Tandy Caide, a dedicated CPA in small-town America, can handle the complexities of everyone’s tax returns. But can she handle an affair with the new vocational agriculture teacher?
Ash’s debut novel brilliantly captures the slanted quirkiness of a Midwest full of small-business owners and exploding home-methamphetamine labs. For the last 25 years, Tandy has striven to live a life of integrity, always conscious of her role in the economic stability of the town. She has quarterly lunches with the Order of the Pessimists, a sodality helmed by her late father’s grumpy friends Doc and Huff, who lovingly criticize her like a daughter. Partly that’s because Huff practically disowned his own daughter, Barb, when she ran off just before high school graduation and came back pregnant. As a waitress, she’s raised Hope alone. She did pretty well until the night of this year's high school musical, Annie, when a rather inebriated Hope played a rather violent Ms. Hannigan. No longer welcome in the regular high school, Hope joins the Vo-Ag class. The night of the musical was also the night Tandy met the Vo-Ag teacher, occasionally known by his given name of Kenny Tischer. Soon Tandy and the strange Vo-Ag teacher, who wears not only a ponytail, but also wool man clogs, have embarked on a passionate romance. Meanwhile, Tandy’s obese husband, Gerald, checks himself into a mental health facility, and Hope seems to have picked up a shady job with a shady farmhand. With staccato phrasing and acerbic observations about the mundane foolishness of everyone’s lives, Ash keenly captures Tandy’s dry wit. Tandy doesn’t simply work as a CPA; she possesses an accountant’s soul, as hilariously evinced by her tallying the costs and benefits of waving to her clients and chaperoning the Vo-Ag students.
Darkly hilarious and weirdly beguiling.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-939419-96-5
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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