by Ander Monson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2005
Too filled with static to come in clearly, too scrambled to be compelling.
Debut story collection set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula ditches clarity, accessibility and character development in favor of a pastiche of fragments.
It is obvious the reader is in for a rough time when Monson opens with a diagram of “Characters and Their Relationships Therein,” followed by “A Helpful Guide to the Characters and their Relationship to Danger, and an Explanation of Some Symbols Commonly Found Therein.” The latter includes such entries as “RADIO: means love & loss & pine-away & frequency.” In addition, “A Table of Contents Provided for Your Convenience” includes “Brief Keyword Index and Identification of Speakers/Main Characters, As Appropriate.” Only then does the actual reading begin. The core trauma of the volume is described in the first offering, “Death Messages: Instructions for the Officer,” a brief second-person sketch describing the snowy night on which a police officer delivers to parents the bad news that their daughter Elizabeth has gone through the ice and drowned. In the title story, we learn that the protagonist’s father has stopped working, moved into the attic and become obsessed with being a Radio Amateur. The protagonist learns about radio himself, takes his younger brother in search of the mysterious Paulding Light and wonders how anything holds together. Radio schematics pop up throughout; midway through, they gather captions that appear to be from the protagonist’s mother, who has gone away. The protagonist finally begins to peek through all the artifice in the last two tales, “I Am Getting Comfortable With My Grief” and “The Sudden Possibility of Nakedness.” His school has been destroyed, his friends are getting married, and his psychologist suggests that he go to the wedding and begin to talk about his mother. But just as he begins to seem interesting, it’s over.
Too filled with static to come in clearly, too scrambled to be compelling.Pub Date: May 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-932511-15-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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by Ander Monson
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by Ander Monson
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by Ander Monson
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
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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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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