by A.A. Gill ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2007
A modest story well told.
A German bomb catches a husband in the wrong bed and sets off a string of discoveries that rearrange the lives of his survivors.
Jaime Gray was in the arms of his latest mistress when the war caught up with him. Across the park, his wife Ailsa was stirring up rationed ingredients to make a cake to mark the 16th anniversary of their loveless marriage while the couple’s 14-year-old twins, Margaret and Luke, were running home to dodge a rainstorm and the air raid. Jaime was not really much of a loss to the world. He disliked his wife and had little use for the children. But with his death went his income, leaving the unhappy survivors no choice but to accept the offer of Jaime’s brother Cal to bring them from London to the Grays’ Northumbrian mansion. Packing up prior to their departure for the North Country, Ailsa finds Jaime’s old diary and learns that her husband had married her on the rebound after an affair with Jessie O’Brien, a girl whom Ailsa had known well and who became pregnant by him but married an Irish sot. The relocation unsettles everyone. The twins, who badly miss their unloving father, don’t know what to make of their much more solid Uncle Cal. Jaime’s parents, whom he rejected when he fled his future in the family foundry, find the children unlovely. Cal’s tepid relationship with the only eligible spinster in the neighborhood weakens with the return of Ailsa, whom he once loved but who chose his more charismatic younger brother. Jessie Logan’s marriage is threatened by her son’s attraction to Margaret and the inevitable revelation that Margaret is his half-sister. If that all sounds over-the-top, it’s not. Gill’s unstylish, unornamented prose sets the old-fashioned story in a spare but sturdy framework.
A modest story well told.Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7278-6453-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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