Chepaitis (Feeding Christine, 2000) is a polished writer, but her second effort comes up short.
A story about the challenge of surviving grief begins well, but falters toward end.
Cricket Thompson, not quite 40 and not quite happy, lives the unexamined life in upstate New York with her two teenaged daughters and dependable husband. On the weekends she volunteers at a bird sanctuary run by town eccentric Pass Christian, planning the gardens and building a butterfly house. Then one day a madman steps into the local mall and begins shooting people, including Cricket's 13-year-old daughter Grace. Seriously injured, Grace lies comatose in a hospital bed with Cricket by her side—for days, weeks, then months. Believing that at any moment her child will wake up, she all but withdraws from the world and rarely returns home, virtually ignoring the adulterous solace her husband is taking with her own sister and the effect of the tragedy on older daughter Janis. When Grace dies, Cricket becomes delusional. At this point, the novel slips into familiar terrain. The first half, which quietly explores monotony and then details the slow unraveling of Cricket's life, provides a generous and sympathetic account of a mundane existence that is nonetheless so much better than the alternative on offer. But after Grace's death, Cricket embarks on a predictable middle-aged search for identity. She finds comfort with birdman Pass, and the two take his mentally handicapped brother Law with them on a trip to New Orleans to look at butterflies. When Cricket discovers Law may have been involved in the mall shootings, she drives away in a futile attempt to escape sorrow. Her subsequent wanderings in New Mexico (is she mad? hallucinating? really enjoying her new life as a waitress?) lack the poignancy of the opening chapters and rely too often on quasi-spiritual coincidences to bring about Cricket's recovery of self.
Chepaitis (Feeding Christine, 2000) is a polished writer, but her second effort comes up short.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-7434-3750-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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