A glittering, accomplished, but rather callow tale of a latter-day Lost Generation.
How empty can the lives of young, rich, beautiful people be? Find out in this jaundiced novel of contemporary mores.
Hollow dissolution comes in East and West Coast flavors in these interleaved narratives of college-aged singletons with wealthy, indulgent parents. Part I takes place at a liberal arts college in New England where an incestuous tangle of undergrads–sarcastic would-be novelist Nicole, Byronic musician Dexter, upper-crust bastard Wes, little-girl-lost Lanie–pause occasionally in their random hookups and drug-fueled partying to mope, with sly literary allusions, about the meaninglessness of their random hookups and drug-fueled partying. Part II shifts the scene to Los Angeles, where a different but intersecting group of kids enjoy a long summer vacation. The lives of these well-heeled Californians are even shallower–the cocaine more copious, the couplings more transient, the life goals restricted to cosmetic surgery and a berth in the entertainment industry. As the title hints, the authors walk in the footsteps of the master of Consumer Realist sagas of post-Reagan gilded youth. Their characters inhabit a social universe defined by musical tastes and designer-brand accoutrements. The men are preening narcissists obsessed with their abs, the women desperate waifs who wispily remember an age of innocence before the sexual debaucheries of middle school, and everyone expresses an inarticulable unhappiness by quoting muzzy rock lyrics. Weiss and Wallace sketch this world with a polished prose style, a fine ear for dialogue and pop culture and a wicked satirical edge. Unfortunately, the story comes to seem as dazed, monotonous and lightweight as its interchangeable characters. The straight-A Cal-Tech physics major is as vapid as the aspiring Playboy bunny, and their Lohan-esque excesses seem correspondingly unserious. As the Sadies and Sarahs and Samanthas trudge blearily from one party and bed to the next, even their parents have trouble telling them apart. In the end it’s almost impossible to keep track of who’s snorting what and screwing whom or why–and harder still to care.
A glittering, accomplished, but rather callow tale of a latter-day Lost Generation.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4401-2073-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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