This follow-the-plot-dots modernization unfortunately falls flat due to Chevalier’s heavy-handedness in turning Othello into...
As her contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series of contemporary retellings of the Bard’s works, Chevalier (At the Edge of the Orchard, 2016, etc.) turns Othello into the story of a disastrous chain of events that follows a black student’s arrival at a white elementary school in suburban Washington, D.C.
Knowing Othello is a tragedy, readers begin the novel with dread, aware that at least one of the sixth-grade protagonists gathering before classes begin will likely meet a tragic end. Among the girls, Dee is smart and popular, Mimi intuitive and thoughtful, Blanca what used to be called “fast.” Blanca’s boyfriend, Casper, is the most popular boy, but “calculating” Ian runs the playground. The children are shocked by the arrival of Osei, a Ghanaian diplomat’s son and the first black child the all-white school has seen. Despite references to Soul Train and bell bottoms, the school’s straight-laced, narrow-minded atmosphere feels more 1950s than post–Civil Rights–era 1970s. Dee and Casper are the two exceptions. Casper offers friendship while the romantic attraction between Dee and Osei is immediately palpable—and goes over the top into ick-factor territory when Dee looks at Osei and “the fire leapt and spread through him.” Meanwhile, Ian senses Osei will challenge his sway over his classmates, especially after Osei shows prowess during a kickball game. Lacking Osei’s confusing charm, Ian comes across as a bully who controls through fear. He manipulates the other kids to create emotional mayhem that closely follows the original play’s outline. The book’s five divisions equate to the play’s five acts, and the novel’s primary pleasure lies in how Chevalier parallels Shakespeare’s plot details—for instance, transforming Othello’s handkerchief embroidered with strawberries into Osei’s strawberry-embossed pencil box and having the kids play on a playground pirate ship.
This follow-the-plot-dots modernization unfortunately falls flat due to Chevalier’s heavy-handedness in turning Othello into a polemic on the evils of American racism and her awkward shoehorning of tween angst into Shakespearian tragedy.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44763-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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