A Machiavellian political thriller that makes Heilemann and Halperin’s nonfiction Game Change look sedate by comparison.
A reluctant politician learns that codes of honor never survive the vicious process of electing an American president.
After flushing out the filth of Wall Street in his debut novel, Brunt (Ghosts of Manhattan, 2012) turns his attention to the seductive world of American politics. Our entree into this scene comes via Samantha Davis, an attorney who has parlayed her skills and looks into a job as the White House correspondent for UBS, a major news network. In this fiction, the U.S. is under the leadership of President Barack Obama’s successor, a bizarre and domineering Democrat named Mitchell Mason. Meanwhile, a conservative attorney named Tom Pauley is tapped by GOP leadership to take a term as governor of North Carolina and ultimately agrees to take his shot at the big job. Brunt takes his time weaving together the stories of these three players, who ultimately prove to be far more connected than they might seem. The book’s primary crisis surfaces when Samantha comes under the sway of Conner Marks, a political fixer who shares with her the crumbs of a political scandal that could send Mason’s comfortable lead tumbling down if it surfaces. As this drama unfolds, Pauley—a fiscal and social conservative with middle-class American values—finds his own beliefs crumbling under the weight of obligatory ethical concessions as Election Day draws near. There are a few well-worn tropes (the first lady’s lesbian affair joins a host of torrid liaisons that always seem to inhabit this kind of closed ecosystem), but they don't derail the narrative tension. Overall, the novel presents a well-researched portrait of the incestuous relationships between the media and Beltway power players while avoiding the broad humor of Joe Klein’s Primary Colors. Tonally, it’s much closer to Beau Willimon’s play Farragut North, which itself was memorably adapted to film as The Ides of March.
A Machiavellian political thriller that makes Heilemann and Halperin’s nonfiction Game Change look sedate by comparison.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7257-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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