Thoughtful, sometimes-exasperating, boundary-pushing fiction.
Fifteen tales of modern anxiety that display Marcus’ range, from angry realism to mind-bending allegory.
Marcus (The Flame Alphabet, 2012, etc.) front-loads his latest collection with four works of unabstracted, relatively frictionless storytelling. “What Have You Done?” tracks a man at a misery-filled family reunion, unable to address what’s estranged him (a sex crime is implied) but unable to explain his rehabilitation either. In “I Can Say Many Nice Things,” a writing teacher’s gig on a cruise ship only underscores his sourness. And “The Dark Arts” and “Rollingwood” deal with men at awful turning points, one being treated for a blood disorder in a German facility, the other raising a toddler while his estranged wife is absent and his job collapses. All dour themes explored by dour men, but Marcus has mastered a bitterly comic tone and a level of psychological insight that make the characters more than repositories of middle-age rage. The remaining stories play more freely with tone and structure, with varying degrees of success. “The Loyalty Protocol,” which focuses on a community that responds to an unnamed apocalyptic shift with constant drills and brutal exclusionary tactics, evokes the chilling tone of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” But in stories like “The Father Costume,” in which people “speak” in cloth, or “Origins of the Family,” where bones are society’s chief construction material, Marcus pushes metaphor to its breaking point, making for sketches that are more intriguing than evocative. He gets to have it both ways, though, in the closing story, “The Moors,” a slow-motion study of a man’s trip to his office’s coffee cart. Its focus on picayune detail and a synapse-firing–by–synapse-firing exploration of the protagonist’s despair suggests Nicholson Baker in a sour mood. But the effect is at once smart, claustrophobic and comic.
Thoughtful, sometimes-exasperating, boundary-pushing fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-37938-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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