A relentlessly lyrical first novel, sometimes captivating with its luminously eccentric characters and setting, but at other times becoming so mannered and coy you’ll want to pitch it through the nearest window. Don—t, though—because Shea’s unusual tale of an orphaned girl, Novena, growing up as the adopted daughter in a house energized and besieged by her aunt Elegia’s four sons (all older than Novena) dramatizes movingly the fragile web of family love and interdependence that simultaneously links together and ensnares the story’s high-definition characters. Novena, more than a bit fey and waiflike, is a sensitive girl whose otherworldly spirit (she creates from remnants of boys’ shirts objects that function as love potions) and essentially outcast state bring her into a hesitant loving relationship with a lonely storekeeper, a sense of what may be her real self in a secondhand clothing shop, and an obsessive psychic kinship with her cousin Zan, a “wild” youngster who commits a brutal crime, then disappears, yet remains on the fringes of Novena’s consciousness—as he does on that of her delusive aunt Annaluna. This is Alice Hoffman territory: the faintly unreal locale (Nile Bay, which both is and isn’t a contemporary small town) and unconventional given names (Elegia’s other surviving sisters are Quivera and Jakarta), coupled with an insistently gossamer prose style that relates Novena’s and Zan’s juxtaposed stories in a godlike aphoristic omniscient voice that’s equally capable of incisive metaphor (“sleep is an unreliable oblivion”; “Novena was suddenly sick of the past, of breathing its fumes”) and overripe sonorous pronouncements (“Grief . . . is like the fine china of emotions, brought out for solemn and momentous occasions”). Shea knows what she’s doing, but her calculated wistful portrayal of bruised souls finding and losing fulfillment in one another will turn off at least as many readers as it enchants.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-395-83810-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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
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