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THUMBSUCKER

One of the year's most charming books. Kirn has little to fear from fellow reviewers. Most of them should love Thumbsucker.

A funny and engagingly original portrayal of adolescence in eruption: an accomplished second novel from the author of My Hard Bargain (1990) and She Needed Me (1992) who has also made his mark as a prominent freelance reviewer.

Kirn's likable protagonist and narrator is 16-year-old Justin Cobb of suburban Shandstrom Falls, Minnesota, dubbed ``the King Kong of oral obsessive'' by the family dentist, who only partially succeeds in breaking Justin of the embarrassing habit he's retained since infancy. Ritalin helps, but it's overmatched by the many confusions the Cobb family's lively behavior continually engenders. Younger brother Joel (an unfortunately sketchily drawn figure) is a conventional teenaged athletic prodigy. The boys beautiful mother Audrey, who works as a part-time nurse helping the rich and famous dry out and sober up, fantasizes a romantic friendship with TV heartthrob Don Johnson. And father Mike is a wonderful character: former football star and inveterate jock-worshiper, he's a bizarre manic-depressive mixture of stoic, bully, chronic whiner, conscientious parent and provider. Kirn takes Justin through an episodic succession of generic rites of passage drugs, rebellion against authority, borderline-sexual initiation but the novel distances itself from the ever-increasing hundreds of Catcher in the Rye imitations through Kirns respect for the individual distinctions, as well as the idiosyncrasies, of this utterly disarming nuclear family. Justin is, of all things, a gifted debater who stars on his schools ``speech team'' while loosely preparing himself ``to become a TV issues-analyst and stir the nation with controversial insights. And the Cobb family's embattled embrace of the Mormon faith occasions a neatly linked series of bittersweet comic scenes climaxed by Justin's matured determination, simply, to become the person he is: warts, thumbsucking, and all.

One of the year's most charming books. Kirn has little to fear from fellow reviewers. Most of them should love Thumbsucker.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-385-49709-1

Page Count: 300

Publisher: Broadway

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999

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CONCLAVE

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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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