essential spark goes out in the shift from comic to tragic.
Inside the head of yet another overheated, middle-aged Englishman in Italy (as in Europa, 1998): in his tenth novel the
effortlessly inventive Parks ratchets up the tragedy and tones down the laughs for a portrait of a man plunged into despair by a schizophrenic son's suicide. A respected journalist who, seeking deeper meaning, turned from coverage of Italy's endless political intrigues to a book-length treatment of “national character,” Chris Burton is in London with his wife, Mara, when he receives the phone call reporting the death of their only son, Marco. His first thought, the most abiding one in the fog of days to follow, is that his 30-year marriage is over. Mara is larger than life, theatrically Italian, a downtrodden Roman aristocrat and a shameless flirt who for years has charmed and overpowered him and everyone else she encounters—as she demonstrates at Heathrow by a performance that gains them seats on the first available plane home. Burton can’t bring himself to tell her they're through, not even when they visit the morgue and she refuses to let him see Marco with her. Instead, grief takes them on separate trajectories, as Burton goes to stay with their adopted daughter, estranged from Mara, and discovers he's seriously ill, while his wife takes over the funeral arrangements and has Marco shipped from Turin to Rome. Meanwhile, Burton proceeds with his plan to interview disgraced former Italian prime minister Andreotti, the capstone of research for his book, while his physical condition deteriorates. Only after Marco is buried does Burton see his spouse again. Following a volatile exchange in the cemetery, he realizes their tragedy is shared and that they have somehow, impossibly, arrived at a new understanding. The male stream of consciousness is rendered no less skillfully and intricately here than in Parks's previous novel, but some
essential spark goes out in the shift from comic to tragic.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-55970-517-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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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