A shadowy narrative that’s carried well by the author’s command and insight.
A dark genre-bending thriller that starts with a drowning but widens to encompass murder, cancer, drug addiction, and satanic ritual abuse.
Dustin is a Cleveland psychiatrist who’s having a rough, creepy year. His wife has died of cancer, and one of his patients is recruiting him to help investigate the drownings of young men that seem to match a pattern. And that’s just the stuff he’s aware of. Dustin doesn’t know that his youngest son, 18-year-old Aaron, is developing a heroin habit in the wake of his mom’s death. Nor does he know that Aaron has been talking with Dustin’s adopted brother, Rusty, who was convicted for killing Dustin’s parents, aunt, and uncle nearly 30 years earlier. Rusty was sent to prison based on circumstantial evidence and Dustin’s supposedly repressed memories of witnessing a satanic cult ritual that provoked the massacre. But that devil-made-me-do-it stuff has been debunked, DNA evidence has exonerated Rusty, and Dustin, we learn, was and remains easily persuaded that untrue things are true. Chaon (Stay Awake, 2012, etc.) has a good time with all this bad news, skillfully exploring our unwitting capacity for self-delusion and self-destructive behavior. He does it through conventional novelistic detail (Aaron’s slide into addiction is particularly harrowing) and psychological insight, unspooling Dustin’s own issues through flashbacks and present-day anxiety. But Chaon also plays with form, at one point splitting Aaron’s narrative into first-, second-, and third-person points of view running alongside each other in columns, the better to suggest disconnection from oneself. But this kind of rhetorical somersaulting doesn’t interfere with the main narrative, and though the novel at times feels baggy, especially the present-day serial-killer plot, overall Chaon has mastered multiple psychologically complex and often fearsome characters.
A shadowy narrative that’s carried well by the author’s command and insight.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-345-47604-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
PROFILES
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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