This 19th novel by Brookner (Falling Slowly,1999, etc.) suggests that the prolific author may have mined as much as possible from her most persistent theme. Always the great anatomist of anomie, Brookner has charted how fear, self-absorption, and family-inflicted wounds keep people isolated from one another. She’s created some memorable—even tragic—characters and traced with great exactness the ways they try, and almost always fail, to break out of the isolation that so bedevils them. Claire Pitt, the young-woman narrator here, is another version of this archetypal Brooknerian figure. The only child of a loveless union, Claire has, like many Brookner protagonists, a lively intelligence, largely used to meditate on various kinds of human folly and speculate on others— secret flaws. She describes herself as “a hunger artist whose hunger is rarely satisfied.” At her job in a used bookstore, Claire encounters the handsome, reticent Martin Gibson, who has wandered in. She manufactures a reason to visit his home, where she meets his domineering, older, ailing wife and learns about Martin’s past as an academic. When his wife dies, Claire steadily pursues the maddeningly elusive Martin. Although they become lovers, he remains shadowy, only grudgingly divulging any of his plans or hopes. Claire, despite believing she is —not destined for the happiness of a settled life,— begins to entertain ideas of marrying Martin. It’s to Brookner’s credit that the depth of Martin’s duplicity, when it’s disclosed, is quite startling. Claire, however, is too chilly and vague a figure (the reader learns much about what she thinks but virtually nothing about the specifics of her past, or even her appearance) to elicit the sympathy Brookner appears to think she deserves. She seems more a symptom than a person. Brookner’s supple, precise prose, and her special sense of the ways in which people reveal and disguise themselves, are still in evidence. Yet, ultimately, they seem in the service here of a theme that she, on the basis of this dry, unmoving book, may finally have exhausted.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50334-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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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