After a silence of eight years, Faulkner's new novel is sure of critical attention and wide interest, not only from the sheerly literary aspect but as an indication of Southern feeling on the controversial subject of the Negro. For the story here hinges on a 16 year old boy's active participation in preventing a Negro, Lucas Beauchamp, from being lynched for the murder of a white man and in being receptive to the impact of change in his inherited misjudgment of the black and white question. Charles, hating his debt to Lucas, who had once saved his life, is the only one who will listen to Lucas' hints as to his innocence, is driven to dig up the dead man to find proof of it. Aided by Aleck Sander, his colored companion, and Miss Habersham, a determined, incorruptible spinster, they accomplish their task and find, not Vinson Gowrie, Lucas' supposed victim, but a timber buyer casually known in the county. When they return, with the Sheriff, the body is gone, and Vinson's family, respected for the terror they have created, help locate that body as well as Vinson's, and the murderer as well, thereby clearing Lucas... That is the plot powered theme, that "injustice is ours, the South's. We must expiate and abolish it ourselves, alone and without help, not even advice."... "human life is valuable simply because it has a right to keep on breathing."... which, in showing how homogeneity in the South, and the Southern tradition of men of good will, is argued and expanded exhaustively, in a flow of concentrated prose. Faulkner's Mississippi and its inhabitants seem to have exchanged some of their nightmare quality for a quality of mercy, Southern style.
Pub Date: June 15, 1948
ISBN: 0679736514
Page Count: -
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1948
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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