The over-familiar emptiness and super-decadence of L.A.—witnessed, this time around, by a very young semi-outsider. Clay is 18, home for Christmas break from college in New Hampshire. And he quickly finds himself in the swim of life such as it is in his circle: movie-industry parents, ubiquitous cocaine, Valium, MTV, bisexuality, anorexia, Mercedes cars—and a daily round of numbing, inconsequential acts. ("I don't think anyone is up yet and I notice that my mother's door is closed, probably locked. I walk outside and dive into the pool and do twenty quick laps and then get out, towel myself off dry as I walk into the kitchen. Take an orange from the refrigerator and peel it as I walk upstairs. I eat the orange before I get into the shower and realize that I don't have time for the weights. Then I go into the room and turn on MTV really loud and cut myself another line and then drive to meet my father for lunch.") After these vacant days, the nights are devoted to partying: the in-group gatherings sometimes involve the screening of snuff films; on one occasion an actual murder-mutilation occurs. So, though Clay does do some running with a crowd that is into male prostitution (to support drug-habits), he eventually backs away from all the sub-zero sleaziness. Throughout, first-novelist Ellis and narrator Clay register everything here with utter coolness: there is no inflection, no viewpoint; you're supposed to simply sponge up all the horror. Unfortunately, however, the effect is one of overkill—like a Soviet propaganda film about the murderous effects of too much wealth. And you never experience revulsion, only eventual boredom. In sum: a flat Cook's tour of kiddie-depravity in Lotusland—with a pounding beat, no zing, and only some marginal voyeur-interest for the insatiably curious.
Pub Date: May 1, 1985
ISBN: 0679781498
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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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