A rollicking soap opera with as many twists as a corkscrew, written with an investigative reporter’s eye for detail and nose...
Debut novel by New York Times Pulitzer-winning correspondent Egan (Lasso the Wind, 1998, etc.) about a young woman’s quest to uncover the cause of her brother’s death.
When young Angelo Cartolano moved to the Pacific Northwest just after WWII, he came up with the idea of importing grapes from his native Italy and eventually created the first (and, many believe, the best) winery in Washington State. But after 50 years, Angelo is getting on. His daughter Brunella is an architect in Seattle, currently working as consultant to a developer who wants to reclaim an abandoned fishing village on the Puget Sound; his son Niccolo is a smokejumper in the Forest Service. An extended drought has led to a series of disastrous firestorms in the region, and Niccolo is killed fighting one of them. Angelo and Brunella are both devastated, but their shock turns to horror when they learn that the Forest Service has begun an investigation into claims that Niccolo’s own incompetence led to his death and those of the men under his command. Brunella, meanwhile, finds herself at the center of a controversy when she testifies at the last minute against the development she had been hired to vet. She also learns that a nearby Indian tribe is trying to siphon off water supplies in order to construct a casino on its reservation, and she begins to suspect that this may have had something to do with the failure of the fire pumps that led to her brother’s death and vilification. Overwhelmed by such revelations, Brunella flees to Italy and tries to begin a new life. But family ghosts are not so easily stilled.
A rollicking soap opera with as many twists as a corkscrew, written with an investigative reporter’s eye for detail and nose for coincidence—even though, like a good Barolo, it’s a bit too strong to swallow in one gulp.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4099-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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 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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