An ambitious novel that touches nimbly on issues of race and class while charting expertly the minefield of family life.
A bond formed in adolescence threatens, years later, to tear apart a family as Giardina’s latest novel (Recent History, 2001, etc.), meaty and multi-faceted, evolves into a loose-knit murder mystery.
Narrator Timmy O’Kane grew up in Winship, “the last white town in greater Boston,” in the ’70s. As the lone Irish guy, he hung out with a bunch of Italians led by butcher’s son Billy Mogavero; Timmy admired his cool, even after Billy assaulted a friendly cop and did jail time. While Billy stays in Winship in a nothing job, the others move out and up; Timmy marries money (Teresa, another Italian), acquires a spacious home in a pastoral hamlet and fathers two daughters. He stays in touch with his old buddies, and has long, boozy conversations with Billy by the ocean, at night. “I played a game with darkness,” Timmy admits. The central weakness of this often terrific novel is Giardina’s failure to define the power of Billy’s appeal or the reasons for Timmy’s enduring susceptibility; the homoerotic aspect of the friendship goes almost unremarked. The darkness arrives. Billy is married by now, to Patty, a tough cookie from the projects. On a visit back there, a gunman kills pregnant Patty, who loses the baby, while Billy, also shot, survives. Witnesses put a black man at the crime scene. (Billy had been fooling around with a married black woman—maybe the husband was seeking revenge?) Then Billy’s retarded brother shows up at Timmy’s place and, without explanation, leaves a gun; Timmy buries it in the woods. Is it possible Billy himself was the shooter? Timmy catches hell once his wife and father-in-law learn about the gun. Giardina keeps us on edge about the fate of the marriage as well as the identity of the killer. Only at the end, when Timmy behaves like a helpless jackass, does the credibility slip.
An ambitious novel that touches nimbly on issues of race and class while charting expertly the minefield of family life.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-28144-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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
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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