Long-winded buildups and lots of drinking in upscale Madrid bars for a plucky American-in-Spain and her loser father.
A hard-shelled 20-year-old Boston University student on a summer internship in Madrid receives a visit from her longtime deadbeat dad.
Catherine has come to Madrid mainly to take a break from her nowhere job at a cocktail waitress at Shooters, in Boston, where she is working her way single-mindedly through school. Brought up largely by her mother—since her father, a drunk who hit his wife over the head with a brick, left home when Catherine was eight—Catherine has grown tough and wary of men (“how little you could trust them”). In Madrid, she works desultorily in a p.r. firm, living with two pampered sisters and going out often and late with a wealthy gay man, Esteban, who may or may not be a pimp. The summer is defined by her “frigidity,” as one rich, nosy acquaintance, Monica, describes it, until Catherine’s father arrives for a week of sauced, awkward encounters in Madrid that help Catherine come to a sense of her own self-worth. (The title refers to a bar game the father and daughter played when she was small and he took her on long afternoon binges.) Second-novelist Fitzpatrick (Where We Lived, 2001) has a touching father-daughter drama going in flashbacks that set up the new meeting between them in the present; she also, however, indulges in a lot of meandering and childish venting of pent-up emotion (between Catherine and her fragile gay roommate, Harlan, back in Boston, and other dubious male specimens) that leak away the story’s potential impact. Fitzpatrick’s method is to pour it all in, when selection might have been more effective. Moreover, Catherine, a girl with some chutzpah and ponderous first-person reflection, rarely speaks in more than one-liner expletives, so that the other characters’ attraction to her is left unclear.
Long-winded buildups and lots of drinking in upscale Madrid bars for a plucky American-in-Spain and her loser father.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019910-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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