The sordidness might appeal to the Palahniuk’s cult following, but it won’t extend it.
The notorious novelist’s excursion into the world of porn might well be his most moralistic work to date.
After reading the latest from Palahniuk (Rant, 2007, etc.), it might be difficult for anyone to become aroused from watching pornography or find any redeeming social value in it. The plot concerns an attempt by an aged porn queen, 20 years past her popular prime, to set a world record for most sexual partners in a single film. Like Rant, this novel is written from multiple narrative perspectives. At the beginning, the men who have enlisted to service Cassie Wright have numbers rather than names, though each of the narrators reveals some surprises about themselves and their relationship with (and attraction to) the actress. Mr. 600 is a veteran contemporary of Ms. Wright, perhaps reuniting for old time’s sake. Mr. 137 is a recognized actor who lost his TV series under scandalous circumstances. Mr. 72, a hopeless romantic who brings flowers to the shoot, is young enough to be Cassie’s son. Mediating among the trans-generational cast is the fourth narrator, Shelia, who has forged a bond with the actress and serves as the “wrangler” on the shoot. Beyond the usual associations of sex and death, the novel takes its title from the suspicion that no woman could survive such an exhaustive sexual grind. In fact, committing sexual suicide might well be Cassie’s goal, though her perspective is generally missing from the novel. Real-time sex is mostly missing as well, with the men spending plenty of time watching her greatest hits from decades past on monitors, awaiting their turn. Bodies and their functions throughout the novel are grotesque rather than titillating, though the author has great sport inventing porn-film titles (To Drill a Mockingbird, Chitty Chitty Gang Bang).
The sordidness might appeal to the Palahniuk’s cult following, but it won’t extend it.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-51788-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
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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