Diffuse, disjointed and ultimately tiresome.
A skewed portrait of a collapsing New York City family, told through the eyes of a pubescent girl.
Murphy’s follow-up to her debut novel, Sea of Trees (1997), has something not unlike a plot: The unnamed narrator (her last name’s Smith, and the clerk at the A&P calls her “Smitty”) attempts to keep her family together after her father, who’s left for another woman, mysteriously disappears. Smitty has her work cut out for her, given that her mother is constantly broke, her brother is a suicidal pothead guitarist, her two sisters are apparently powerless and her ailing grandmother has moved into their apartment—which, by the way, is miserably stacked full of garbage because nobody can afford to have it removed. Sad stuff on the face of it, but it’s never clear if Murphy wants to play this as tragedy, absurdist comedy or something in between. Smitty herself is hard to get a read on: She casually peppers her statements with the f-word and calls her father’s new girlfriend “the slut,” but none of it makes her seem tough, but more like grimly lackadaisical. She hangs out with John, who runs a hot-dog stand; he routinely feels Smitty up, though that doesn’t stop her from continuing to visit him. This joyless, inchoate tale is salvaged somewhat by Murphy’s skill for lovely imagery: Cornsilk strands hang off Smitty’s father’s arms “like tassels from a cowboy’s suede coat”; the shop teacher covered in filings “glows with all his metal shining.” But the book is more an assortment of cobbled-together episodes and observations than a coherent story. Just as the search for the absent father begins to gather steam, random plot twists intrude—a long-lost aunt arrives, Smitty learns to bend spoons with her mind. Perhaps there’s a postmodern, anti-narrative commentary buried within all this, but only the most generous reader will care to hunt for it.
Diffuse, disjointed and ultimately tiresome.Pub Date: March 12, 2006
ISBN: 1-932416-50-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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 novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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