It's too bad about the dogs, but they died for a good cause.
Ranked sixth on the Wall Street Journal's list of Best Places to Live, the fictional town of Littlefield, Massachusetts, is far from paradise.
First there are crude brown-paper signs—"Leash Your Beast Or Else"—stuck up around the park. Then there's a dead white bull mastiff, the first in a series of dogs to turn up poisoned. Dr. Clarice Watkins, a sociologist who's just moved to town to study "what must be the world's most psychologically policed and probably well-medicated population," soon realizes her subjects' supposed state of grace is under siege. She's causing a bit of a stir herself as a short, black woman who wears a turban and is believed to know the Obamas; she's invited to share her "tribal cuisine" at Celebrate Your Heritage Day. One of the more troubled residents in Watkins' study cohort is Julia Downing, the preteen daughter of a fraying marriage between a hypervigilant, bored mother (about to embark on an affair with the town's literary novelist) and a depressed, recently jobless dad. Their little girl is a bit of a sociologist herself. She keeps a popularity report on the seventh grade in which the top 10 shifts every day, but her own position remains at 73. For her history class, she's working on a survey of Littlefield, in which she counts 23 banks, 6 dog groomers, 4 yoga studios, 4 liquor stores, 1,146 psychotherapists, and 679 psychiatrists. For all her mother's helicoptering, Julia manages to get into some real scrapes. She falls through thin ice when trying to rescue a dog out on a wintry pond. Soon after, she screws up a babysitting job so badly that hospitalization and euthanasia are involved. These disasters have the perverse effect of making her a celebrity on social media. Berne (Missing Lucile, 2010, etc.), who won the Orange Prize for her first novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood (1997), is a sure hand at the dinner parties, school concerts, teacup tempests, and true moments of suspense that make a suburban comedy of manners par excellence.
It's too bad about the dogs, but they died for a good cause.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9424-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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