A first novel set in New York that tries too hard to be outrageous as it skewers relations between the sexes in pretentious prose. Mixing haiku, verbal riffs with narrative and commentary divided into paragraphs rather than chapters, New Yorker Sima recalls an October of 40ish Jane Samuels, for whom ``Fall is the winter'' of her life, ``a catch-up season.'' Each October, Jane stops working and takes stock, but in the October of the novel, on the fourth anniversary of her ``monumentally one-sided divorce,'' she is hit on the forehead by an enormous rabbit; the only witness is a rather rabbity-looking crossing guard. The search for Jane's bunny-assailant becomes a hallucinatory trip, not down the rabbit- hole like Alice, but around a New York which is as lunatic as Carroll's Wonderland. As the month passes, Jane frequently checks out the hardware store where ex-husband Harold and his new and expectant wife can be found. She visits with her ``longevity friend Susan,'' who not only has an ``intense relationship'' with her dog, Patches, but believes in replacing, like ``eyeglass frames,'' negative frames of mind with positive ones. She tries to improve her parents' sex lives (her mother is making love to the medieval bestiary that emerges from her apartment walls, and her father has something going with the drains). She continues her affair with ``the Fling,'' Nate, the married psychiatrist to whose wife she also gives sex lessons; makes frequent love to the extraordinary nose of Gerald, as well as to men who appear out of the wall; is harassed by a libidinous elevator; and, most ordinarily of all, shops for a new bathing suit and eats lots of ice cream. The rabbit is found, dealt with, and October finally draws to a close as, mercifully, does Jane's Bad Hare Day. Some acute insights, but the relentless raunchiness dressed up in wannabe experimental drag ends up giving both sex and the avant garde a bad name.
Pub Date: April 16, 1995
ISBN: 1-56478-072-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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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