A novel that will especially appeal to cinephiles, for Erickson (Our Ecstatic Days, 2005, etc.) makes more allusions to...
Standards of verisimilitude don’t apply to this dreamlike novel of obsession and movies.
In 1969, Vikar Jerome arrives in Hollywood, a holy innocent of sorts, fresh from seminary studies and out from under his rigidly Calvinistic father. He’s recently seen his first movie, and one of his first reactions to this stunning experience is to shave his head and have images of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor (“the most beautiful woman and the most beautiful man in the world”) tattooed on his lobes. We mark time in the novel by cultural events (Vikar briefly finds himself accused of the Sharon Tate murders when he’s holed up in a cave in Laurel Canyon) and by cinematic experiences, both films being released in the ’70’s (e.g., The Long Goodbye, Apocalypse Now) and classic movies (especially Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc) that Vikar catches in various art theaters around L.A. Vikar moves through many of these experiences much as a child would, for he has little knowledge of the mean streets of the city, but he also shows himself capable of violence, for one of his first acts is to hurl a food tray at a hippie who mistakenly takes the figures on his head for James Dean and Natalie Wood. Ultimately, Vikar finds himself rubbing elbows with an assortment of Hollywood denizens who seem like refugees out of a David Lynch film—he becomes obsessed with Zazi, young daughter of a star of lesbian-vampire movies—and he also winds up becoming an Academy Award–nominated editor with, needless to say, a quirky approach to montage. At the end of the novel, dream becomes reality when a disturbing image of one of Vikar’s recurrent dreams turns out to be a frame inserted into almost every movie ever made.
A novel that will especially appeal to cinephiles, for Erickson (Our Ecstatic Days, 2005, etc.) makes more allusions to film, starting with his Godard-like title, than perhaps any novelist you’ve read.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-933372-39-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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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