Witty, convincing, and quite moving: a touching portrait of private grief and redemption.
An old man reckons up the fortunes of his life, written with touching English restraint.
Digby Walton has had a good inning, as they say in Britain, and he’s more than ready to move on. The heir to a ceramics fortune, Digby grew up in a manor house and, despite a brief stint in the army, saw very little of the world other than the family business. Thus, sheltered by circumstance and naïve by nature, he was somewhat unprepared for the emotional demands of family life, and his marriage to a Maltese immigrant of humble origins went badly: Digby’s dull and undemonstrative behavior as a husband caused the fiery Victoria eventually to tire of him and move back with her parents. He hasn’t fared much better with his son: Theo is a spoiled and shiftless lad who can’t hold down a job, blames his father for his own failings, and accuses him of driving his mother to despair. Digby finds some solace in the company of his friend Daisy, a faded actress whose son Howard (a demented anarchist who writes a violently seditious online blog) provides her with ample parental woes of her own. As Digby putters about on a history of the family business, Daisy tries to track down Howard, who was last heard from in Thailand and has begun posting bomb-making techniques on his Web site. Theo, in the meantime, has been thrown out of the house by his fed-up wife Jill and spends most of his time hanging out with jazz musicians and dictating a rambling, accusatory letter to Digby onto a tape recorder. No, this isn’t Beckett. It’s not even Sartre—for, the end, British author Wall (The Lightning Cage, 2003, etc.) manages, inexplicably but credibly, to wrap up the loose strands of these ostensibly meaningless lives into one large interconnected and harmonious strand.
Witty, convincing, and quite moving: a touching portrait of private grief and redemption.Pub Date: June 14, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32779-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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