Accomplished short-story writer Shacochis (Easy in the Islands, The Next New World) weighs in with an ambitious first novel that (like Susan Sontag's recent tome) mixes sexual intrigue, political revolution, and volcanoes. Like Sontag, Shacochis seems determined to convince readers of his seriousness, though he makes fewer concessions to simple readability. Set on a small island in the Lesser Antilles, this sprawling fiction includes extended dialogue in a Caribbean patois, lots of unexplained regional jargon, and not a little religious mumbo-jumbo thrown in for its lurid iconography. At the center of this ``world brimmed with queer opportunities'' is Mitchell Wilson, a 26-year-old economist working as a consultant to the Ministry of Agriculture on the island of St. Catherine. The naive American quickly discovers the surreal nature of island life—the inscrutable natives with their old folk ways; the educated class with its complicated political manipulations; his fellow expats, all part of the problem, not the solution. No character here appears without a story: Mitchell's buddy Isaac, a hard-working local ``bwoy,'' has disappeared for political reasons involving his dead father; Cassius Collymore, a poor and abused fisherman's son, grows up to be a vicious member of the secret police; and Kingsley, a double-talking conservative member of the government coalition, likes to play games with Mitchell's head. Among the various white people who find themselves in this unforgiving locale are: Sally, a good-hearted special-ed teacher from Kansas whose unspeakable naivetÇ leads to her brutal murder; Adrian, a New York yuppie whose pampered life is changed by what she witnesses; and Johanna, Mitchell's ex-lover who suddenly appears after a five-year absence that's included a bad marriage and drug-dealing. Overwritten and—worst of all—full of trite observations. Shacochis's lumpy novel lacks the very qualities that make his stories so remarkable: grace and economy.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-684-19260-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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