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NOUGHTIES

Name: NOUGHTIES
Author: Ben Masters
ISBN: 978-0-307-95566-1

by Ben Masters ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 9, 2012

A green debut that yearns for the caustic wistfulness of Bret Easton Ellis or Nick Hornby, but just misses.

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A young Oxford graduate spends his last night of university drinking and reflecting and drinking and drinking and drinking.

Like a literary version of Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping,” the hero of this debut novel by Oxford-grad Masters gets knocked down—a lot. Eliot Lamb is a 21-year-old English student who is about to get expelled from the idyllic coziness of university. Despite being a textbook example of the British university system, Eliot swears he and his mates are different. “We don’t stand on these benches drunkenly railing the Latin creed at bloated dons and upper-class undergraduates. Nah. We are more likely to chant yob tunes and smack empty pint glasses upside down on our gelled heads,” Masters writes. For this Last Night, Elliot has gathered his tribe in the King’s Arms: There’s Jack, the best mate; Scott, the sensitive rugby player; and the girls, Ella, Abi and Megan, with whom Eliot’s crew shares lurid histories. Masters spikes the drunken ramble from pub to bar to club with flashbacks to Eliot’s university history, not least his heartbroken obsession with former girlfriend Lucy, who receives many the maudlin text message during the narrative. The novel is well-written and propulsive, but there’s a lack of experience that makes the book’s drama seem painfully naïve. “After all that’s happened, I can’t tell if finishing uni is a relief or a tragedy...all the drama; all the heartbreak and confusion. I think we share too much history to lose one another though; we’ve held our thorny secret for so long. But trying to keep it buried has done us no good.” Unfortunately, Elliot’s big “secret” is a worn-out trope found in every freshman creative writing class. The rest of the story, while readable and entertaining, amounts to Elliot’s regular punctuation of “Guzzle, guzzle, chug.”

A green debut that yearns for the caustic wistfulness of Bret Easton Ellis or Nick Hornby, but just misses.

Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-307-95566-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GOLDFINCH
by Donna Tartt

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE FRIEND
by Donna Tartt

- SEEN & HEARD
Podcast Will Explore Bennington College Lit Trio

- SEEN & HEARD
‘The Secret History’ Is New ‘Today’ Book Club Pick

- SEEN & HEARD
Jenna Bush Hager Launching Author Podcast

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

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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.