Brave in its unforgiving nastiness, if not exactly amusing (and possibly toxic to aspiring writers).
After her compassionate and hugely successful debut (Drowning Ruth, 2000), Schwarz returns with something completely different: a mean-spirited account of how a would-be novelist who can’t write brings down her best friend, a domestic social striver with dreams beyond her means.
With great fanfare, Margaret quits her job as a private school English teacher in Manhattan to write her novel. Although she and husband Ted, who works for a nonprofit foundation, already live on a tight budget, Ted is supportive at first. After all, Margaret has assured him she can finish the book in a year. The only problem is that Margaret has no clue what to write. She begins and discards the story of a Vietnam vet, but mostly she fritters away her time in all the ways many (most?) writers know all too well—household chores, eating, and communicating with her best friend Lydia. Lydia and Margaret grew up together in California. Margaret was always the precious, more sophisticated one, the Robinson Crusoe to Lydia’s Friday. But it quickly emerges that Lydia has some natural talents, for language and writing for instance, that went unremarked by either. Lydia is still in California, a stay-at-home mom with a brood of children and a strapped budget whose husband Michael has just been lured from his tenured professorship to a better-paying, more high-profile job at a well-endowed museum. Soon Lydia and Michael begin spending: restaurant meals, new clothes, a new dishwasher, a new house. As Lydia e-mails Margaret about her domestic misadventures and about her increasingly more luxurious life with its accompanying financial strains, Margaret’s creative juices begin to flow. When Margaret starts egging Lydia on to greater excesses of spending, she knows she’s manipulating Lydia’s life for the purpose of her Madame Bovary–like plot. Unfortunately, she can’t manipulate Lydia out of financial ruin anymore than she can get her book published.
Brave in its unforgiving nastiness, if not exactly amusing (and possibly toxic to aspiring writers).Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-49972-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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