One of contemporary fiction’s most ebullient and versatile stylists strikes again—straight to the heart.
Four novellas, each in its own way elegiac and tributary, from the accomplished North Carolinian author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989) and Plays Well with Others (1997).
The slightest and most conventional, “He’s One, Too,” picks up the gay themes prominent in several of Gurganus’s earlier stories: it’s a remembrance of the scandal created by a “beloved local church and business leader” entrapped and arrested on a morals charge—a charge by the boy (now middle-aged) who had loved the older man hopelessly, and found mirrored in the former’s “offenses” his own emergent homosexuality. “The Practical Heart” (winner of a National Magazine Award) recounts both the early years of its narrator’s Scottish great-aunt, a resourceful spinster whose reduced fortunes stimulated her fascination with portrait painter John Singer Sargent, and his own relationship with her in her old age, which he has lovingly captured and mythologized. All four stories are set in, or hearken back to, the sleepy hamlet of Falls, North Carolina—portrayed perhaps most affectionately in “Preservation News,” a memoir of flamboyant Tad Worth, after his death of AIDS: a “preservationist” who loved and lobbied to save beautiful old houses, sashayed around Falls with Capote-esque gusto, and left a legacy of compassionate engagement with his world that’s crystallized in the story’s memorable central set piece—a delicately haunting biracial ghost story. Even better is “Saint Monster,” in which a 50ish classics professor recalls his puzzled, loving relationship with his father and namesake (“the ugliest white man alive in Falls”), a long-suffering traveling salesman repeatedly cuckolded (now there’s a switch) by his infantile wife, and the bearer of a compromising secret from which he stoically shields his son. This is a triumph of subtle, slowly building characterization, and more: a compact epic of deeply entangled and enigmatic parental, marital, and filial devotion and duplicity. Unforgettable stuff.
One of contemporary fiction’s most ebullient and versatile stylists strikes again—straight to the heart.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-43763-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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