A voyage of discovery cloaked in suburban ennui: engaging and hard to let go.
An obsession with, or desire to forget, a long-missing child keeps a family trapped like flies in amber.
It’s the stuff of tabloid TV or heartbreaking features in the weekend paper, but the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of a young girl from a picture-perfect suburban family can still make for good fiction. Here, Ward (Sleep Toward Heaven, 2003) presents us with the Winters family (never mind the slightly melodramatic name), a messed-up bundle of upstate New York Wasps who have never quite recovered from the day when the youngest of three daughters, five-year-old Ellie, went missing after school and was never heard from again. Both of her sisters, repressed Madeline with her Wall Street broker husband, and self-consciously slumming Caroline—once a pianist with a gold pass to Juilliard and now a dozy cocktail waitress at a revolving bar in New Orleans—blame themselves for what happened. The mother, widowed now after despair, anger, and drink took her husband, lives alone with her odd rituals and fanatic questing, 15 years later, still to find her Ellie. Most of the story is observed by Caroline, a noncommittal walking zombie and not the most thrilling of hosts through this emotionally frozen world. Things slide downhill even more when she insists on taking up her mother’s search by going to Montana in search of a girl in a magazine photo whom the two of them are convinced is Ellie. Not surprisingly, things don’t turn out as planned, but not far from the end Ward turns the tables, bringing together two other seemingly unrelated narrative strands into a walloping knockout of a finisher that would seem like a cheap trick if it weren’t so thrilling. The author plays a smooth game, not showing her hand until the absolute right time, just when you were about to give up on a seemingly hopeless case.
A voyage of discovery cloaked in suburban ennui: engaging and hard to let go.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2004
ISBN: 1-931561-72-9
Page Count: 300
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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