Stodgy, colorless family drama, despite all the soapy complications and armchair psychology.
A genteel squabble over a Cornwall farmhouse, featuring a cast of many.
Maud Todhunter is a diplomat’s widow who’s left to cope with her dead husband’s numerous offspring whether she wants to or not (she was Hector’s second wife and they had no children). She wants to sell Moorgate, the fine old house he left her, and retire alone to a small cottage in Devon. But Moorgate holds so many memories, complains Selina, one of Hector’s daughters by his first wife, Hilda, that perfect mother who loved to iron—and knit, and polish doorknobs—and whom Maud still resents even though she’s now been dead for more than 30 years. Selina has never forgiven Maud for taking her mother’s place, and has never shut up about it either. But Posy, her own charming daughter, loves her stepgrandmother, despite Selina’s sneering disapproval. And Patrick, Selina’s husband, a noble soul, stopped loving his selfish, condescending wife long ago and is having an affair with Mary, a warmhearted woman who struggles to care for her paralyzed son and infirm parents. Enter Mike, a successful novelist and playwright whose actress wife left him and their infant son to make it big in Hollywood. Mike’s sister Melissa helps him care for little Luke, even though she has inoperable cancer. Radiantly lovely nonetheless, she falls in love with Moorgate and its rugged caretaker, Rob, not telling him that she is near death so she can enjoy her last few weeks of life to the utmost. Mike and Posy soon pair off, as he notes her “durability,” which he finds “enormously attractive.” Then Maud’s dearest friend Daphne reveals a devastating secret regarding Hector, causing the old ladies to sip their tea just a little faster and ponder the meaning of it all.
Stodgy, colorless family drama, despite all the soapy complications and armchair psychology.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28785-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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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