A first novel sets the youthful ordeals of Maya, an idealistic and somewhat imperceptive American student at Israel’s Hebrew University, against both the historical and contemporary struggles of Western Jews. The “sealed room” of the title refers both to the gas-proofed area in Israeli homes created during the Gulf War and to Maya’s uneducated heart. Her Israeli relatives Tami and Nachum, with their soldier-son Dov and daughter Ariela, offer domestic comfort as they struggle with the reticent Dov, who has recently lost an Army buddy. Shortly after her arrival in Jerusalem, Maya moves in with Gil, a passionate artist who was discharged from the Army under a cloud. She becomes the submissive recipient of his love and of his sudden, violent rages. Meantime, a neighbor, disoriented Holocaust survivor Shifra Feldstein (something of a mystic), believes Maya to be a kind of savior and presents her with gifts and cryptic messages. Along the way, the story is occasionally interrupted by Shifra’s grief-clouded ruminations on the course of her life, though the verbal drift of her musings deprives them of much solid resonance. Maya goes camping with Dov and his friends, is beaten and raped by Gil, and receives word of her mother’s impending death from cancer. Shifra’s own sudden demise precedes Maya’s return to America, where her mother reminisces, then becomes reconciled with her daughter, in the process clarifying some of the emotions and experiences Shifra had shared with her. Maya returns to Israel, dumps Gil, and vows to try to see Israel as it really is. The portrait of Maya is compelling, and her confusions and doubts are persuasive, but comparing her experiences with dangerous boyfriends and an ill mother to the Palestinian peace talks is a stretch. The tale doesn’t need, and can't sustain, the larger geopolitical and historical implications that are added to it.
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14300-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
