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A CASE OF CURIOSITIES

This odd first novel, set in 18th-century Europe, begins with the removal of an unusual mole (a collector's item for the surgeon) and ends with one ingenious mechanical object (a Talking Head) being severed by another (a guillotine): things, in other words, get as much play as people in a novel that sometimes reads more like a museum tour. Every tour needs a guide, and so we have an arch, long-winded, mock-erudite narrative voice to tell us the story of Claude Page of Tournay, Switzerland. It is 1780 when the ten-year-old Claude loses his mole (and middle finger); the valley's biggest landowner, the self-styled AbbÇ, is so shocked by the gratuitous amputation that he moves Claude into his mansion house, giving him a challenging if haphazard education, and part-time work enameling pornographic watchcases for Parisian clients. The relationship (it's the only real one here) between eccentric benefactor and respectful protÇgÇ ends abruptly when Claude believes he has witnessed the AbbÇ murdering a female harpsichord student. (Only much later does he learns that the AbbÇ was destroying his own flawed handiwork, a mechanical puppet: ``what collectors of curiosa...called ein Kurzweil. A pastime.'') Claude lights out for Paris, becomes apprenticed to an unpleasant bookseller (the agent for the watchcases), and is seduced (unsexily) by a wealthy customer out slumming for a ``little peasant boy''; but picaresque adventure is always secondary to Claude's mechanical projects, which culminate in the much-exhibited Talking Head, a costly venture financed by an aristocrat who insists the Head declare Vive le Roi—hence, its post-Revolutionary rendezvous with the guillotine. A leaden exercise that (unlike, say, Patrick SÅskind's Perfume, another recent journey into 18th-century France) opens no new windows into the past.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-15-115793-6

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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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OF MICE AND MEN

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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