Too many secrets overwhelm the story.
Fear, lies, and violence beset an impoverished town.
The fictional northern California town of Carverville, “utterly comatose, on the point of death, a ghost town in the making,” is the setting for a convoluted mystery by fiction, travel, food, and arts writer Downie (A Taste of Paris: A History of the Parisian Love Affair with Food, 2017, etc.). The story centers on James Paul Adams, now in his 50s, who grew up in Carverville, an outsider by virtue of his educated, city-bred parents and his own intelligence and ambition. College, law school, and a career as a judge kept him away for 4 decades; but when the novel opens, James has returned, bearded and wild-haired, suffering and searching. He is a widower, grieving for his lost wife; he has escaped “certain people” pursuing him; and he is haunted by the memory of Maggie, the young woman he once loved. After traveling aimlessly in a rented RV, he finds himself at the Eden Seaside Resort & Cottages, run by the eccentric Beverley, a busybody who seems to know everyone and everything in town and who protects James from the suspicions of Carverville’s sinister policemen, who are eager to run strangers out of town. More than economically depressed, the town is a hotbed of corruption, racism, and xenophobia, lorded over by gun-toting bullies notable for “stupidity, ignorance, and dullness.” This is Trump’s America, Downie implies, rife with climate-change deniers and white supremacists. Deputized as immigration agents, the “citizen posse of good white boys” is led by a villain who has created “a reign of terror.” The plot thickens—becoming positively clotted—after James and Taz, a teenager who works for Beverley, find a cage, washed up on the shore, containing what appear to be human bones. As James plunges into investigating the bizarre discovery, he comes upon increasingly grisly evidence. Downie piles on “life-changing revelations” that, unfortunately, are obvious to the reader long before they are unveiled for James; and the extent of violence makes the novel blur into dystopian science fiction.
Too many secrets overwhelm the story.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-004-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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