Next book

THE GOOD TERRORIST

In her first signed novel since the mythical Canopus in Argos series, Lessing returns to reality—and to her considerable gifts for social observation and vivid characterization. Using a spectrum of left-wing characters, she focuses on the kinds of personal instability that would be drawn to—and solaced by—a terrorist stance. Lewis Carroll's Alice began by falling down a rabbit hole; Lessing's contemporary Alice—36, overweight, mixed-up, terrified of sex—began by being involved (since the 1960's) in squatter's rights and increasingly radical politics. Though celibrate, Alice lives with and for gay Jasper, a self-centered, politically pure neurotic (psychotic?) who has decided, as the novel opens, to make contact with the provisional IRA. Though early chapters show Alice's curious mixture of calm competence (she manipulates bureaucrats at the gas and water boards into supplying service to their new "squat") and infantile rage (she travels to her father's house one night expressly to throw a rock through the window, striking one of the young children of his second marriage), Alice is a mother-figure, not only to Jasper but to every waif that drifts into her new squat. Yet from the beginning there are frissons of instability: in Alice herself and in the web of relationships that quickly form in the household which Alice, quite unconsciously, dominates. These tensions increase as Jasper and Bert, titular heads of the group, become absorbed in plans for a car-bombing. Lessing offers a penetrating analysis of a sub-group (middle- and working-class political extremists) more often caricatured than characterized. The main focus is on the pathology of ideological "purity"—on how a "good" person like Alice, who is instinctively kind whenever one of her blind spots is not in operation, can arrive at an almost bland acceptance of random violence. The implied political message—as idiosyncratic as the quirky feminism of the Canopus series—seems to be that we don't really choose our political preferences; rather, they choose—and then control—us. The self-deluding Alice is not an easy character to spend time with, but her story is an extraordinary tour de force—a psychological portrait that's realistic with a vengeance. Altogether, this is a book which is strong as a diagnostic study of political motivation—and stronger still as an uncannily authentic character-study.

Pub Date: Sept. 25, 1985

ISBN: 0307389960

Page Count: 466

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1985

Categories:
Next book

THE SECRET HISTORY

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

Categories:
Next book

OF MICE AND MEN

Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.

This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define.  Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936

ISBN: 0140177396

Page Count: 83

Publisher: Covici, Friede

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936

Categories:
Close Quickview