Oscar Wilde weathers all the uncouthness that the Old West can throw at him in this bawdy, bewildering historical fantasia.
Notch’s tall tale opens in 1910, as two racist 10-year-olds in a Southern town offer rotgut liquor to an elderly African-American man, Erastus Greener, in exchange for stories of his youthful adventures in the Old West. He complies with the letter, if not the spirit, of their demand, by recounting a sprawling fable that reimagines the author Oscar Wilde’s real-life speaking tour through the American West as a slapstick picaresque. Stranded for months in Colorado in 1882 when his train breaks down, Wilde finds himself immured in the squalid mining town of Leadville, living in a saloon and rubbing shoulders with all manner of colorful ruffians. These include a man with Tourette’s syndrome whose uncontrollable bursts of profanity don’t disqualify him from becoming Wilde’s manservant; a derelict Native American man aptly named He-Who-Breaks-Wind; and a coarse buffalo hunter whose vicious, omnidirectional and sometimes quite funny insults make him Wilde’s main rhetorical foil. Then, feminist icon Susan B. Anthony comes into town by stagecoach; she’s a preachy, humorless woman who insists on being addressed by the gender-neutral title “Person Anthony,” and sets about rallying the town’s prostitutes to the cause of female suffrage. This may sound lively, as does a subplot about a psychotic outlaw dispensing Mormon gold, but what mainly happens in the book is a lot of windy dinner-table palaver. This usually pits Wilde’s subtle, ironic repartee (“America is a cosmopolitan land,” he says, upon seeing a Native American drinking in a saloon), which goes way over everyone’s head, against the cussing, farting and braying of the yokels and rogues around him. Occasionally, it lapses into earnest soapboxing about the injustices borne by women and gay men. Notch writes vigorous prose (“The Salt Lake City Kid pulled a revolver from his holster, cocked it, and emptied all six shots into the sign, grouping three inches across, except a single flyer that flew wild. He did not count those. Few shooters did”), and his vivid characters certainly have distinctive voices. But his gross-out humor is so overwrought that it grows tiresome long before the line “I pee pee in my teepee” surfaces. As a result, readers lacking the patience of Eustace’s 10-year-old audience may find it rough going.
A verbally boisterous fish-out-of-water satire that’s sometimes entertaining, but often grating.
Pub Date: April 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499151510
Page Count: 268
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
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
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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