Well-wrought but painfully heartfelt: Hellenga’s (The Fall of a Sparrow, 1998, etc.) story creeps at a snail’s pace to a...
An amiable if long-winded coming-of-ager set amid the quiet turmoil of 1960s rural Michigan.
Appleton is too far from New England to invite comparisons to Norman Rockwell, but it brings Andrew Wyeth to mind: Bleak, open countryside alternating with sparsely settled towns full of weather-beaten Dutch Reformed churches. Martin Dijksterhuis grew up in Appleton, on the orchard that had been in his family for generations, but he’s the son of an unusual household. His intellectual mother (a University of Chicago grad) speaks Latin and French with her son at home and drives him 40 miles to see The Fountainhead and the other highbrow movies that never make it to the hinterlands. Martin is an apt pupil but not sure he wants to follow his mother’s footsteps. For one thing, he’s in love with Cory Williams, the black daughter of the orchard foreman, and in the summer before his freshman year at the University of Chicago he discovers that Cory is pregnant. He wants to marry her and start a family, but she and her family suddenly leave town—and Martin finds out that his father paid them to go. He gives up on college, joins the Navy, later takes a job with the railroad in an attempt to forget her. The one thing that sustains him is his love of blues guitar, and he spends all his spare time tracking down old musicians and looking up arrangements of their work. He compiles an anthology of the music but lacks the confidence to go on stage himself. When he finally gets some advice from a preacher/bluesman about trusting in his own abilities, he faces up to his desire to be both a musician and a father.
Well-wrought but painfully heartfelt: Hellenga’s (The Fall of a Sparrow, 1998, etc.) story creeps at a snail’s pace to a conclusion obvious to most readers long before.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2533-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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