Grimly deterministic, but intermittently powerful.
Episodes from the life of a man damaged by sexual abuse and other mischief during seven years in Chicago’s state-run juvenile institutions.
“Adults are always waiting to attack and you have to do everything possible not to disturb them.” That’s Theo’s chilling insight into those seven years. Elliott has drawn on his experiences as a ward of the court in previous novels (A Life Without Consequences, 2001, etc.), and in this, his fourth, he peels the onion, first presenting Theo as an adult, then moving back and ending with a ten-year-old on the cusp of his family’s disintegration. Afraid (like everyone else) of his criminal father, raped repeatedly by a caseworker, Theo has always been a passive victim. We meet him as a struggling 33-year-old in San Francisco, searching for sexual humiliation at the hands of his dominatrix girlfriend. When Theo can’t take the heat, he flies back to Chicago: the runaway child is a runaway adult. (And Elliott is as tied to Chicago as Joyce was to Dublin.) The book has substantial narrative problems. Ambellina is Theo’s third dominatrix, which makes for wasteful rehashing. It’s hard for a passive protagonist to stir interest. Significantly, the two most involving episodes show Theo taking charge: giving a 13-year-old burglar a lesson in beating the system; stalking and confronting his erstwhile rapist. The studiedly cool adult episodes in San Francisco and Amsterdam are the least successful, and we never get a handle on his marriage to the ill-defined Zahava. The prose, however, does provide some good goose bumps once we track back to Theo’s first apartment and his Mexican roommate Maria. These two 18-year-old rape victims are both looking for more pain: “You don’t hurt me enough,” complains Maria, Theo’s one true love, and it’s the story’s most bitter irony that more beatings might have kept them together. There seems no hope for Theo, but Maria finds peace and fulfillment as a single mother.
Grimly deterministic, but intermittently powerful.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2004
ISBN: 1-931561-62-1
Page Count: 207
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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