Tar-black comedy and psychosexual gamesmanship—both make for an enthralling and ultimately sobering debut.
First-novelist Coote turns Nabokov on his head in this tale of an Aussie Lolita who sets her sights on a witless teacher who thinks he’s falling in love with her.
In her dreamy, epistolary narrative, a nameless and decidedly precocious 16-year-old seductress decides she must have her 34-year-old teacher at any cost. It isn’t long before she’s cajoled her way into his bed; not long after that, he loses his job, she runs away from her aunt and uncle’s house, and the two of them are cohabitating. Describing what the narrator does as “seduction,” however, is almost a misnomer, since sexual pleasure just about never enters into her head. Early in the book, she kills time compulsively sketching other girls in her class, usually contorted into painful, sexually degrading positions. It doesn’t seem to give her any sexual gratification; she simply likes the feeling of power. To ward off any readers who might be wondering what deep, Freudian secrets lie in the tangled recesses of her mind, the protagonist makes this categorical declaration: “It was my personal evil . . . wasn’t young and malleable and suffering from an overdose of Hannibal the Cannibal. I wasn’t a victim of child sexual abuse. I didn’t grow up in a civil war zone.” The 25-year-old author, who apparently wrote Innocents when she was only 19, excels at describing the infinite small ways in which the girl manipulates every aspect of her life with the teacher to maintain his sexual attraction to her. If he’s not looking at her with utter lust every second of the day, then a new trick must be devised—fast. Coote deserves acclaim not just for the narrator’s remarkably compelling voice but for so ruthlessly limning her deepening psychosis. Without falling back on dime-store psychology, she does not forget for a moment that true dementia lurks in the girl’s behavior.
Tar-black comedy and psychosexual gamesmanship—both make for an enthralling and ultimately sobering debut.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8021-3927-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
