Like the character Sarah, the novel is an uneasy mix that never quite rings true.
The novelized account of how Listfield (The Last Good Night, 1997, etc.) coped with the unsolved disappearance of her almost ex-husband, sculptor George Dudding.
Sarah, the articles editor at a woman’s magazine (much like Self, where Listfield worked), is separated from her German-born sculptor husband Todd. After a meteoric rise, the faltering of Todd’s career has strained the marriage, and he has been sleeping in his studio, but both he and Sarah remain devoted to six-year-old daughter Eliza. Days before Todd is due back from a trip to Florida where he’s supposedly helping a friend, Sarah gets a call that Todd is missing. She learns that he was actually visiting an old girlfriend with whom he’d rekindled a romance. He walked out of the woman’s home after an argument, leaving behind his wallet and everything else. Was he murdered by the girlfriend’s jealous boyfriend; has he disappeared on purpose as the local Florida policeman thinks; or did he walk into the sea and drown, as Sarah and the private detective she hires come to believe? Without a body, the case remains unsolved. Sarah is left to cope with Eliza’s grief and her own sense of loss. At the same time, Sarah navigates the shark-infested waters of magazine publishing and revels in NYC career-girl banter with her friends, and the reader, about diets, clothes and who is after whose job. With a coworker, Sarah begins developing a new magazine idea. Four months after Todd’s disappearance, she is also dating a cute magazine designer. Barely a year after his disappearance, Todd’s work is embraced posthumously at a major gallery opening attended by Sarah and Eliza. Sarah gets to be both a noble heroine overcoming great loss and a plucky career girl making her mark and getting her man.
Like the character Sarah, the novel is an uneasy mix that never quite rings true.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3783-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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
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