Grossly disappointing.
Debut novel from TV producer and photojournalist Kogan (Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War, 2001).
In the middle of a performance of Medea, Elizabeth Burns faints. Just before she passes out, she has a vivid, visceral recollection of April Cassidy—someone Elizabeth hasn’t thought about for 35 years. Once upon a time, they had been best friends, but April disappeared from Elizabeth’s memory just as completely as she disappeared from their first-grade classroom. After remembering this lost little girl, Elizabeth becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to her. It doesn’t take long to discover that April’s mother, Adele, killed both her daughters and herself, but Elizabeth still wants to know why. As she begins to build her story, Kogan deftly exploits the conventions of the murder mystery to create a sense of tension and uncertainty, but the basic facts of the central murder are never in doubt. The mystery Elizabeth is exploring is the mystery of motive—which is, at its core, the essentially unknowable mystery of each human self. These opening chapters are eerie and gripping. A TV producer, Elizabeth uses her job as an excuse to exhume this long-buried tragedy, and, as she digs deeper, she uncovers unnerving parallels between her life and Adele’s. Both women are torn between career and motherhood, and both are unhappy in their marriages. Then she finds transcripts of Adele’s sessions with a psychiatrist, and the whole novel falls apart. These documents are about as nuanced—and about as convincing—as a dramatic reenactment on Unsolved Mysteries. Adele ceases to be a complex and tragically compelling figure and becomes, instead, a cartoonishly facile exemplar of postpartum psychosis. Elizabeth, too, devolves into a rickety collection of neuroses, and Kogan provides explanations for each that make it seem as if there is an obvious, inevitable connection between trauma and symptom. The ending is both predictable and absurd, and Kogan provides a coda that is so sentimental and improbable that it’s an insult to the reader.
Grossly disappointing.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56512-562-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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.
