Painfully honest, compassionately cognizant of human frailty and complexity, alive to the magic of creativity yet aware of...
Mansbach (Angry Black White Boy, 2004, etc.) searchingly examines the fraught relations between Jews and gentiles, blacks and whites, men and women, artists and those who nurture them.
The bravura opening set piece catches Tristan Brodsky racing through his East Bronx neighborhood in 1935. “Fifteen years old, the sum total of five thousand years of Jewry, one week into City College, a mind on him like a diamond cutter,” Tristan is an aspiring writer desperate to break free from his immigrant parents’ narrow expectations. A half-century later in Prague, teenage photographer Nina Hricek similarly burns to escape stifling communist Czechoslovakia, maybe even find the father who fled for the States five years earlier and hasn’t been heard from since. The third chapter introduces Tristan’s grandson, Tris Freedman, or RISK, as he prefers to be known in 1989, when the suburban teen spray-paints his tag on freight trains in between gigs playing hip-hop music at Connecticut bar mitzvahs. In one of the novel’s many smart, socially revealing scenes, RISK takes Grandpa—a famous novelist who’s having a bad bout of writer’s block—out to the yards with some cans of Red Devil. Rejuvenated by his contact with a new kind of culture, Tristan begins a novel that, when it’s published in 1997, completely overshadows his embittered grandson’s fiction debut. A raft of full-bodied characters helps Mansbach maintain equal interest in the separate plot lines until Nina eventually meets Tris, but the central, tragic story concerns the slow disintegration of Tristan’s marriage to Amalia, a gifted poet whose initial connection with Tristan as a fellow writer is so electric that it takes her 50 years to finally rebel against his cold, punishing ways and dedication to his work at the expense of his family. The moving, chilling final scenes suggest that Tris is the same sort of unapologetically egotistical artist.
Painfully honest, compassionately cognizant of human frailty and complexity, alive to the magic of creativity yet aware of its consequences—very exciting fiction indeed.Pub Date: March 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52044-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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