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RAMEAU'S NIECE

Name: RAMEAU'S NIECE
Author: Cathleen Schine
ISBN: 0-395-65490-4

by Cathleen Schine ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 1993

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A pretentious tale of deluded love and lust in Manhattan's indulged academe—in a third from Schine (Alice in Bed, 1983; To the Birdhouse, 1990). Margaret Nathan—a historian who can't remember anything and the author of the surprising bestseller The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny—is hailed as brilliant by deconstructionists, feminists, and ordinary readers, none of whom has actually read her book. All of which sounds like a promising start for a comic novel of manners that will wittily skewer current literary icons and political shibboleths—except that Margaret, happily married to Edward, a Columbia English professor who constantly quotes poetry, is instead trapped in a story defined by an idea: a heavy, literary 18th- century idea based on her discovery of an obscure Enlightenment manuscript called Rameau's Niece, a not-so-subtle play on the actual Rameau's Nephew by Diderot—a philosophical work in the form of a dialogue between a lecherous philosopher and his beautiful female pupil. As Margaret translates the work—a pastiche of filched quotes—she's not only seduced by what she's reading but increasingly bored with Edward, finally deciding that ``the desire to know really is desire'' and that what she needs is a new lover. It's a decision that leads to embarrassing encounters with her teeth-obsessed dentist; with a kindly Belgian salesman who merely wants to give her the latest in hi-fi equipment; and with a friend of a former college roommate, who may be having an affair with husband Edward. This should make for high stylish comedy, of course, but it doesn't, as Margaret, the relentless theoretician, now back with Edward, recalls the philosopher's other advice: ``...in the end our truest opinions are not the ones we have changed, but those to which we have most often returned.'' Smug and smirky in-jokes without much bite and less humor, regaled by and for characters who well deserve their narrow, complacent lives.

Pub Date: April 2, 1993

ISBN: 0-395-65490-4

Page Count: 280

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
KÜNSTLERS IN PARADISE
by Cathleen Schine

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GRAMMARIANS
by Cathleen Schine

- BOOK REVIEW
THEY MAY NOT MEAN TO, BUT THEY DO
by Cathleen Schine

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

- SEEN & HEARD
The Snowy Day Is NYC Library’s Most Popular Book

- SEEN & HEARD
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- SEEN & HEARD
NYT Readers Voting on Best Book of Past 125 Years

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.