A clever premise, but Dewberry takes Ellen (and Diana) far more seriously than most readers will.
In Dewberry’s fourth novel (Sacrament of Lies, 2001, etc.), a woman staying at the Ritz in Paris the night that Princess Diana dies finds herself re-examining her own identity as the trophy wife of a powerful man.
Ellen, a tall, blond beauty without a career of her own, has accompanied her Nobel Prize–winning physicist husband Lawrence to a conference in Paris. The day before Diana’s death, Ellen is briefly mistaken for the princess while getting out of a limo, then crosses paths with her in the hotel’s beauty parlor (the one scene in this oh-so-seriously interior monologue when Dewberry shows a witty light touch) and in the restaurant. With Lawrence busy giving speeches and delving into issues of string theory with his colleagues, including a German woman whose caustic self-assurance underlines Ellen’s intellectual insecurity, Ellen has way too much time on her hands. Out jogging because she can’t sleep, she comes upon the accident scene where she meets a mysterious American photographer named Max, who had taken her picture in front of the hotel that afternoon. Increasingly neglected by Lawrence, who understandably finds her a tad trivial, Ellen obsesses about the death, especially after Diana begins to talk to her. Ellen is soon agonizing over the handsome Max too and tracks him down. He’s fighting his own demons as a guilty member of the paparazzi. There’s the requisite single moment of passionate, deeply meaningful lovemaking before he motorcycles away into the mist. Diana’s soul travels on too, but not before Ellen recognizes the parallels in their lives: unsympathetic mothers, husbands with little time for their emotional needs, their own yearnings for love. The mundane human moments, as when Ellen realizes with embarrassment that she’s walking in the wrong direction, are far more resonant than her ponderous soul-searching.
A clever premise, but Dewberry takes Ellen (and Diana) far more seriously than most readers will.Pub Date: March 20, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101221-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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