Stark realism offset by unreasonable optimism.
In the final year of the Great War, an American family copes with the Spanish flu pandemic.
The Brights, Pauline and Thomas and their daughters, Evelyn, Maggie, and Willa, relocate to better their future. Leaving Thomas’ family tobacco farm in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, the family moves to Philadelphia, where Thomas’ bachelor uncle, Fred, a mortician, has offered to teach him the undertaker’s trade. Since he has no other heirs, Fred intends, in time, to bequeath his funeral business to the Brights. Pauline and the daughters narrate in turn. At the time of the move, the Brights are still reeling from the death of baby son Henry. Pauline becomes obsessed with death and insinuates herself into the mortuary business to an extent Fred never contemplated. What appears to be a slow-paced and rather morbid tale of domesticity gains momentum when Thomas volunteers to serve in the Army and leaves for basic training. Shortly thereafter, the influenza epidemic grips Philadelphia. As the death toll mounts, Fred’s genteel funeral parlor becomes an auxiliary morgue. When Pauline and Maggie visit the slums on a charitable mission, Maggie wanders into a row house by herself and finds its occupants dead or dying except for a squalling, neglected infant boy. She and Pauline return home with the child, whom the Brights will name Alex, and inquiries as to his parentage are soon abandoned in light of the sheer number of orphaned children already taxing city authorities. Nevertheless, Maggie keeps the location where she found Alex a secret and lies about the fact that the boy's sister was still alive when Maggie rescued him. Pauline is torn between her guilt over this impulsive adoption and her desire to fill the void left by Henry’s death. Up to this point, the novel is a somber and unblinking appraisal of grief, calamity, and the disruptions of war. An extended denouement, set in the 1920s, lightens the mood, but at the expense of believability.
Stark realism offset by unreasonable optimism.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-58596-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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