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THE ARK OF THE MARINDOR

A hit-and-miss thriller—and complete change of pace—from the author of such highly praised story collections as Harry Belten and the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto (1975, not reviewed) and Kingdoms (1980). Targan’s heroine, Katherine Dennison, is a middle-aged photographer and author of children’s books who has recently divorced her unfaithful husband, still mourns the death (in a kayaking accident) of her only son, and maintains distance from her estranged adult daughter and other painful reminders of her past by living aboard the Marindor, a 45- foot wooden sailing boat, on the central Maine coast. Accepting a proposal to search for the cargo of a plane that crashed in the ocean near Charleston, South Carolina, Katherine is held hostage, with her passengers, by a pair of gun-toting stowaways who want in on the action (which is never fully explained, though the underwater McGuffin is a computer disk crucial to Swiss bankers’ control of the international money flow). Little happens during the four days of the Marindor’s journey southward, though Targan skillfully depicts the wary cat-and-mouse relationship that develops between Katherine and the more interesting of her captors, the saturnine, surprisingly articulate Calvin Barstow. An unconvincingly tame denouement and a tension-draining abundance of flashbacks are the major weaknesses of a curious fictional hybrid whose knowing presentation of Katherine and her chosen milieu is far more engaging than its very perfunctory plot. Targan’s real interest obviously lies in exploring the changes in his protagonist, who travels from having “not believed that people like herself were betrayed by a husband, or that they could lose a son to nothing” to realizing that the Marindor was her escape and refuge from other human connections, and it is these to which she must find a way to return. More successful as character study than as drama, and an unusual step sideways in its accomplished author’s unusual career.

Pub Date: May 15, 1998

ISBN: 1-878448-80-3

Page Count: 234

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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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OF MICE AND MEN

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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