A splendid debut that promises great things to come.
An Ojibwe writer from northern Minnesota's Leech Lake Reservation debuts with a sad but graceful tale of seven people living in a crumbling housing tract called Poverty.
The first 25 or so pages on the desecration of the Mississippi River and the people's land may be some of the most depressing ever written, and it takes a little effort to wade through them. It's worth it, though, as the novel then unfolds with delicate human insight and engaging drama. ``Poverty'' is the Kennedy-era housing tract in the corner of the Minnesota reservation. The tract is in a forested area where, long ago, twins Duke and Ellis built a cabin with their pregnant teenage girlfriend, Jeannette. Now in their 70s, Duke and Ellis live in a Pontiac Catalina parked outside the house where Jeannette lives with daughter Celia and Celia's boyfriend, Stan, a Vietnam vet. Also in the house is the six- fingered and mostly silent Little, Celia's son (the father's identity is one of the central dramas here), as well as Donovan, whom the twins found half-frozen in a car crashed nearby. In Poverty's second house live Stan's sister Violet their father is in prison, their mother fled the reservation long ago and her daughter, Jackie. The unique bonds these people have to each other are revealed as each character tells his or her story: Stan recounts the night in Vietnam when his best friend was killed; Jeannette her tale of being taken to Iowa as a young girl to serve as maid servant to two elderly white women; and Donovan reveals how Little, brimming with excitement, climbed above Poverty and to his death. This clan forms an odd but tightly knit unit that faces numerous deaths, rapes of people and of their land and other hardships, transcending them all. They claim Poverty, and poverty, as theirs, transforming it into a place of beauty that perhaps only they can recognize.
A splendid debut that promises great things to come.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55597-231-4
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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