Highly promising, even if flawed.
From the British playwright, screenwriter, and author of an award-winning children’s trilogy: a first adult novel about a hitchhiker’s nightmare journey into a police state.
He lives with his family but stays in his room, eating alone. Our nameless narrator is a recent college graduate who would rather sponge off his father than job-hunt, his spiritual malaise caused by his parents’ divorce. Then he decides to take a trip, no destination in mind. He gets a ride on a truck on a three-day run, speeding through the friendly Europe of euros and open borders to arrive at a grim, heavily guarded frontier. After a difficult crossing, he and the trucker encounter a roadblock manned by armed thugs, where the trucker is tortured and killed, though the hitchhiker jumps free. The thugs burn the books from the truck, but the hitchhiker salvages one (he also has a mysterious envelope given him by the trucker). He walks to the nearest town, where a beautiful young woman contacts him, and he falls asleep in her car. He wakes to find himself in a room with a dead man. Chief of security, says the woman, Petra, member of a revolutionary cell. Those books, written by a gentle humanist now in exile, were intended for readers listed in that mysterious envelope. The hitchhiker has no choice but to join the cell. After another roadblock and shootout, from which the revolutionaries emerge victorious, Petra tortures the lone survivor. That’s too much for the hitchhiker, who races into the woods. All this is wonderful dark suspense, but how do you top it? Nicholson peaks too soon, before the halfway point, and the thrill is never quite recaptured in the second half, as the hitchhiker makes discoveries about himself, his profound love for his parents, and the importance of kindness to strangers. There’ll be entertaining cat-and-mouse games with the secret police, leading to an extravagant Hitchcock-style climax, and a closing postmodernist twist provides an existential dimension.
Highly promising, even if flawed.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51327-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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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