A quietly moving tale of people formed and trapped by history and locale, told with an authentic taste for the region.
The latest southern saga from Malone (Red Clay, Blue Cadillac, 2002, etc.) reaches across 40 years in the lives of two childhood friends who see each other mainly at Christmas.
Noelle (“Noni”) Tilden was born on Christmas Day 1956. So was John (“Kaye”) King. In their hometown of Moors, North Carolina, everybody knows just about everybody else, so it’s inevitable that the two are going to meet—and they do, on Christmas Eve 1963. Noni’s family are prominent local citizens (her grandfather founded the town bank), while Kaye’s folks are poor blacks (his grandmother keeps house for the Tildens). But Noni and Kaye become friends and grow up together during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s. The story is broken into 12 chapters, each set on or near a Christmas Day, and it follows the fates of the Tildens and Kings with the clarity of a family album. Kaye’s mother goes mad and leaves him to the care of his grandparents; he becomes radicalized by the black power movements of the Nixon years before making peace with the world and going on to medical school and a successful practice. Noni loses her beloved elder brother Gordon in Vietnam, marries local boy Roland Hurd, and settles down to raise a family. Most of the developments are realistically gradual and unsurprising (Noni’s hell-raising brother Wade gets himself into trouble again and again as a boy and grows up to run a string of unprofitable businesses; Kaye’s wheelchair-bound grandfather loses all ambition and spends his last decades dozing in the sun), but there are also moments of more intense drama, as when Noni develops a cancerous tumor and Kaye is called in to save her. But even that intensity seems to arise out of patterns and traditions set long before.
A quietly moving tale of people formed and trapped by history and locale, told with an authentic taste for the region.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-4022-0012-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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