Trash, despite the highfalutin Latin and classic references—and not very sexy trash at that.
A woman returns to the boarding school where her roommates committed suicide 20 years earlier and faces a rash of new deaths: a gothic, unconvincing debut replete with incest, homoeroticism, and murder.
Jane Hudson, the recently divorced mother of a small daughter, has taken a job teaching Latin at Heart Lake School for Girls in the Adirondacks. Readers will be immediately struck by the manufactured logic of such a return, given Jane’s history. As a scholarship student, she had slavishly adored her roommate Lucy and Lucy’s brother Matt. So had Jane’s other roommate Deirdre. At the same time, the girls fell under the sway of their Latin teacher. Domina Chambers showed a marked and unnatural favoritism toward Lucy, whose mother had been her close friend until an untimely pregnancy during college. At the end of Jane’s senior year, Deirdre committed suicide, soon followed by Lucy and Matt, who drowned intertwined. Chambers was blamed as a bad influence and fired. Only Jane knew, or thought she knew, the real reasons for the suicides; she recorded her speculations in a private journal. Soon after her return to Heart Lake, incriminating pages of that long-lost journal start showing up, and it’s not long until Jane's favorite student ends up in the hospital after an apparent suicide attempt. Then another student turns up dead. While the school psychologist who throws blame upon Jane is a menacing presence from her first introduction, the police investigator turns out to be Lucy and Matt’s cousin, who had participated long ago in certain orgiastic rites with Jane and her friends. When Jane begins to put together the pieces of both sets of suicides, her own life is endangered even as romantic sparks kindle.
Trash, despite the highfalutin Latin and classic references—and not very sexy trash at that.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45088-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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