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WHAT’S THE GIRL WORTH?

Name: WHAT’S THE GIRL WORTH?
Author: Christina Fitzpatrick
ISBN: 0-06-019910-5

by Christina Fitzpatrick ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2002

Long-winded buildups and lots of drinking in upscale Madrid bars for a plucky American-in-Spain and her loser father.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.