The latest volume in Murray's sweet and smooth roman Ö fleuve (Trainwhistle Guitar, 1976; The Spyglass Tree, 1991) takes his boy Scooter into early manhood and up from the South; it's a self- consciously heroic tale of a charmed life, patterned on the ``vamps, choruses, riffs, call and response patterns, breaks, chases, and so on'' of jazz. One needn't rely on Murray's convenient gloss—the simultaneously published The Blue Devils of Nada (see p. TKTK)—to appreciate the rhythms and structures of Scooter's story. Just out of college in the 1920s, bass-playing Scooter (renamed Schoolboy) is invited by the Bossman himself (modelled on Duke Ellington) to join the best roadband in the country. He begins crisscrossing the US not only covering the great historic trails, but also grooving on the ever-expanding world of American culture. In the band are men whose nicknames indicate their characters and resonate with the fullness of domestic life and world myth. Murray's Whitmanesque troop includes Old Pro, a walking embodiment of the canon of musical history, technique, and lore; Osceola Menefee, the all- American mutt from Okefenokee; Malachi Moberly, who could have had a career in baseball; and Mucho Moola, a rich kid from Chicago, trained on the violin but hooked on the trumpet. The Bossman introduces Schoolboy to Daddy Royal, a Harlem king who retired from dancing and who warns about settling for a hustle over hard work and class. Schoolboy, still planning on accumulating enough cushion to go to grad school in the humanities, nevertheless attends to the wisdom of his elders. The Bossman even sets him up, on the sly, with a Scheherazade, Gaynelle Whitlow, who hips him to the truth about Hollywood after Schoolboy's extended personal appearance in the bedroom of Jewel Templeton, a beautiful movie star with a thirst for knowledge as voracious as his own. Murray's quest narrative finds Schoolboy heading back home after all this sophisticated yawping. One only hopes this Proustian stomp ain't over yet.
Pub Date: Feb. 13, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-43986-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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