Presents music as a glorious metaphor for an approach to life.
A music teacher’s failure with her gifted student is the starting point for this deeply felt meditation by adult and YA author Hall (The Noah Confessions, 2007, etc.) on the demands of musical passion and human love.
Pearl teaches violin at McCoy’s, a music store in West Los Angeles that carries offbeat instruments and caters to musicians. She is a lonely divorcée half in love with the store’s manager Franklin, a musical purist, and pursued by the much younger fellow teacher Clive, a bass player. The novel shifts between the present, in which Pearl faces her limitations and overcomes her misassumptions about the men in her life, with the recent past, in which she found, taught and lost Hallie, the most gifted student of her career. Unlike most of Pearl’s students, whose well-to-do parents push them to play, 14-year-old Hallie was an orphan of meager means. She received a grant to take lessons despite the disinterest of the aunt and uncle raising her. Hallie’s natural talent and quixotic moods quickly captivated Pearl. From the vantage point of the present, Pearl recognizes that she invested too much of herself in Hallie, in part because, like Hallie, Pearl had faced great family opposition to her musical ambitions as a child. While teaching Hallie, however, she convinced herself that her concern for the girl’s welfare was altruistic. When Hallie came to Pearl and claimed she was pregnant, Pearl called the authorities on the domineering uncle she suspected of abuse. Then Hallie turned on Pearl, denying any problems at home and accusing Pearl of obsession and improprieties. No charges were filed on either side, but all contact—including lessons—ceased. Sorting out her mistakes with Hallie, Pearl re-examines her own relationship to music. Hall’s passion for music shines through—her rumination on the violinist’s wrist is particularly lovely—and because she never cuts emotional corners, there is nothing self-indulgent or sentimental about Pearl’s hard-won if makeshift happiness with down-to-earth Clive.
Presents music as a glorious metaphor for an approach to life.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56512-463-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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