The initially engaging story loses momentum two thirds through, but this is still a debut of great promise.
Australian poet Lawrence perceptively details a young schizophrenic’s struggle to live and love normally.
Narrator James Molloy lives with his family near Sydney. It’s a close and loving clan, but from early childhood on James is increasingly aware of disturbances in his head. He sees gold circles and hears strange noises. He’s an indifferent student who gets into trouble for talking to himself and letting his imagination run wild: “. . . words appeared, held together by strings and hooks of light.” In his senior year of high school, instructed by his voices, he skips out and heads to Sydney. There, he meets Stephanie, a slightly older woman who also hears voices and talks about moving to Ireland, where her father died. When the two meet again, Stephanie tells James that she’s been diagnosed as schizophrenic and suggests that he too needs help. His parents, especially his father, are at first reluctant to accept that James is mentally ill, and the young man himself is determined to make a life as a poet. His struggle to do so is movingly and persuasively detailed with perfectly pitched emotion. Feeling better after he’s put on medication, James meets Tina in her father’s bookstore and falls in love. But when she’s killed in an accident, he finds himself falling through the hole that had once only opened on his bed but now is everywhere. His pills don’t help, and James is hospitalized for three years. Emerging as healed as he’ll ever be, he knows that with daily medication he is “ bound to the earth by a synthetic dependency, but on the earth nevertheless.” James then heads to Ireland to find Stephanie, but instead—in an overlong, overdrawn, and unconvincing interlude—meets singer Sarah, the third young woman who will drastically change his life.
The initially engaging story loses momentum two thirds through, but this is still a debut of great promise.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0999-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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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