by Erika Krouse ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001
Dead-on dialogue, realistically drawn scenes of extreme psychological discomfort, a subtle use of metaphor, and bursts of...
A hard-hitting debut collection of mostly first-person narratives about the often-disappointing romantic entanglements of women in their 20s and early 30s.
The gimmick here is initially confusing: each story is preceded by an epigraph from saucy Mae West ("It's not the men in your life that counts—it's the life in your men," etc.); this device, combined with the fact that the stories are narrated by characters who sound a lot alike, suggests that they're interconnected even when they're not. Nonetheless, the collection sings. Krouse, who has had short fiction published in the Atlantic Monthly, is a masterful and elegant storyteller, and these tales are filled with narrative and stylistic surprises. "Drugs and You" begins with an anecdote about the narrator's boyfriend, quickly interrupted by a dramatic, Meghan Daum–like aside: "This story is about drugs. I'm telling you because I was surprised, too." The perfect boyfriend, it turns out, is a junkie, and the piece details the downfall of the perfect relationship. In the deliciously catty "Other People's Mothers," the narrator recounts her relationships with her friends' and boyfriends' mothers, finally explaining—with no unnecessary drama—her repulsion from her own mother, a nasty specimen who torments the narrator's blind, senile grandmother. "The Husbands" turns what could be a clichéd situation—a woman who, in her own words, "like[s] to sleep with other women's husbands"—into an exquisite anatomy of self-loathing and the destructive behavior that results from it. Virtually all these stories, in fact, explore the nature of compulsion, as in "No Universe," in which the narrator watches her friend Mona, racked with guilt after an abortion, start a family with a man she doesn't love. The bombastic style and unflinching honesty of the whole collection is reminiscent of Elissa Schappell and Emily Carter.
Dead-on dialogue, realistically drawn scenes of extreme psychological discomfort, a subtle use of metaphor, and bursts of lyric epiphany: an irresistible debut.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0244-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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BOOK REVIEW
by Erika Krouse
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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
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by Donna Tartt
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
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
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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