Quietly elegiac but unnecessarily convoluted tale of missed connections and rotten luck.
A magician conjures abject failure in Wallace’s (The Watermelon King, 2003, etc.) bleak fourth.
Glum protagonist Henry Walker is first seen as a ten year old growing up in a dismal hotel where his drunken father toils as a janitor (after losing his fortune to the Crash and his wife to TB). Henry’s sister is his dearest companion until he encounters Mr. Sebastian in Room 702. An otherworldly man with a chalk-white complexion, Sebastian trains Henry in the dark arts, then disappears, spiriting Hannah away. After a police investigation turns up no clues, Henry’s father reluctantly apprentices him to a talent agent, Tom Hailey, who, thinking Henry will be more marketable as a Negro magician, places him on a regimen of pigmentation pills. World War II intervenes and Henry (white again) garners a rep for magically deflecting bullets and bombs in France. Upon landing in New York Harbor, he’s taken up by an ambitious manager, Eddie Kastenbaum. However, when Henry raises his beloved assistant, and Hannah surrogate, Marianne, from the dead, his career tanks prematurely. In dreamlike sequences, Henry revisits Room 702, trying to parse the enigma of Hannah and Mr. Sebastian. Is Mr. Sebastian really the Devil? Did he murder Hannah? Did Henry kill Mr. Sebastian with a stunt knife? A private eye and the denizens of a traveling Southern circus where Henry has washed up—his magical powers much diminished—narrate their recollections and speculations over an 11-day period in May 1954. The voices of the individual narrators, including the circus proprietor, a strongman and a lady of stone, are as unconvincing as their motives in caring so deeply about Henry, an aloof cipher in their midst. The framing incident, which opens and closes the novel, is the abduction of Henry (now in blackface) by three racist thugs who beat him nearly to death, stopping only when someone accidentally wipes the shoe polish from his face.
Quietly elegiac but unnecessarily convoluted tale of missed connections and rotten luck.Pub Date: July 3, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52109-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
