A fine, funny, and deft blue-collar valentine from Bartolomeo (Cupid and Diana, 1998).
Can a D.C. publicist find true love with a union organizer? Oh, yes. Twice.
Nicky Malone never really got over her passionate affair with Tony Boltanski, her smart, sexy, and all-around working-class hero. But she broke it off when he didn’t show up for a family wedding—he evidently didn’t realize the event meant so much to her, but he’d got involved with yet another union in dire need of his help, and that was that. Nicky’s been single ever since, despite the best efforts of her favorite cousin Louise, a matchmaker. A rosy-cheeked romantic, Louise believes everyone has a soulmate, even though she’s never found hers. Nicky deplores her taste in men—her latest is a rich jerk who composes morose folksongs—and keeps pointing out that her other cousin, a studly mechanic named Johnny, would be perfect for her even though he’s engaged to someone else. Louise and he should have fallen in love years ago, though Nicky can’t think of a way to make it happen. In the meantime, her widowed mother, a devout Catholic and incessant nag, prays that Nicky will marry soon. The time-is-running-out lectures are getting on Nicky’s nerves, so going to Rhode Island to publicize a nurses’ strike seems like a nice change of pace—until she finds out she’ll be working with Tony. But it’s a good cause. The overworked and underpaid nurses, dedicated professionals all, really need help. Their offices have been sabotaged, and the hospital administration is making them out to be the bad guys for “abandoning” their patients. Nicky and Tony don’t agree on much—she favors a soft sell, he talking tough—but their romance is rekindled. The strike draws to a close and love is in the air. Louise and Johnny finally fall in love, and it’s for keeps. Are Nicky and Tony next?
A fine, funny, and deft blue-collar valentine from Bartolomeo (Cupid and Diana, 1998).Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0461-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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