Thoughtful and bracingly unpredictable, though the lack of a resolution is frustrating.
Gilded young go-getter creates, not always legally, a cocoon for his family in Dee’s mostly buoyant fifth novel about money, family and mortality.
Adam and Cynthia Morey, Midwestern transplants in Manhattan, have beauty, brains, charm and a formidable determination to carve out a comfortable world for themselves, though they do not come from money; Adam’s father was a pipe fitter. The couple, married when they’re only 22, have some simple rules. Forget the past. Seize the day. Keep in shape. Glow! Two kids, April and Jonas, arrive early; no problem. Adam has the Midas touch and the trust of his boss at his private-equity firm. Honoring complexity, Dee (Palladio, 2002, etc.) refuses to paint Adam as a total narcissist or philanderer. Unlike his peer Sherman McCoy in Bonfire of the Vanities, Adam has a doglike devotion to his wife, the stronger character. They dote on their kids; family means this charmed circle of four. Everyone else is an outsider. When her stepsister has a breakdown, Cynthia dumps her like somebody else’s garbage. Dee tracks the Moreys over 20-plus years as they strive for a life without limits. Their sex life still sizzles; aging is forbidden; their money keeps growing, helped by Adam’s involvement in insider trading, a risk he enjoys. Still, we ignore limits and connectedness at our peril, and that’s Dee’s theme, implied without glib moralizing. The novel’s final third turns darker. Both parents are frantically busy, heavily involved in charity work; they’re boldface names, with their own foundation. Then Cynthia takes a time out; her dad is dying in a Florida hospice and she feels uncharacteristically bereft. The pampered college-age kids appear trapped. April is spiraling downward; drugs, meaningless sex. Jonas, an art student and half-hearted rebel against his family’s values, almost loses his life to a madman because of his lack of survival skills.
Thoughtful and bracingly unpredictable, though the lack of a resolution is frustrating.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6867-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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