GREEN

Name: GREEN
Author: Benjamin Zucker
ISBN: 1-58567-174-6

by Benjamin Zucker ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2002

Multiple readings could perhaps yield more insight—not an onerous task since this is one of the more beautiful books in...

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The brilliant minds of today and yesteryear crowd into the exquisitely designed pages of this odd folly of an art novel.

Seeing no reason to leave well enough alone, globetrotting Ivy League jeweler Zucker continues the fictional experiment he first assayed in the much-ballyhooed Blue (2000). Here, Green has a character of sorts in the figure of Abraham Talcott, a gem merchant in Greenwich Village who leads a dismally uninteresting life. Fortunately, Zucker is using Tal only as the most slender of threads upon which to hang his obsessive themes. For this is no ordinary story. Tal’s occupies only a small portion of each right-hand page. The remainder is taken up by commentaries and quotations that, at first blush, seem to have only the most tangential relationship with Tal’s story. Additionally, every left-hand page in this coffeetable-sized volume is entirely taken up by a reproduction of a painting, photograph, or design. The structure of Green is intentionally Talmudic, though many of its themes are far more secular. Meantime, the cast of characters Zucker calls upon for his commentaries and imagery is a pleasing one: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cézanne, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Black Elk, lots and lots of Bob Dylan, and a host of rabbis and religious scholars. Any attempt at a straight reading is quickly rebuffed, for the story of Tal, his acquaintances and musings, is almost aggressively noninvolving. As a result, the reader’s eye turns to the pictures—lush imagery from Vermeer, Pollock, and Blake—and all those commentaries crowding each page. The babble of voices is obviously meant to be taken from multiple directions, like the facets of a gem. But why? What is the reader supposed to get out of this experience besides a desire to listen to Bob Dylan and maybe read up on their Fitzgerald?

Multiple readings could perhaps yield more insight—not an onerous task since this is one of the more beautiful books in recent memory—but it’s difficult to regard Green as anything more than a curio.

Pub Date: May 1, 2002

ISBN: 1-58567-174-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Overlook

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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CONCLAVE

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

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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

Categories:

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | LITERARY FICTION | RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

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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.