by Frederick Reuss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 21, 2002
The largely academic riffs and worryings of a man humiliated by a dread inertia—but who still talk, talk, talks.
The elegant, sometimes amusing, but claustrophobic tale of an English prof who gets the “wasties,” an illness that sounds, more than anything, like a grim, plain, crippling stroke.
Whatever the cause, Michael Taylor has been reduced to infantilism, diminished into a creature petulant, helpless, incontinent, and mute—though with a muteness pertaining only to spoken words, not for an instant precluding the sufferer’s writing the present stylish, allusive, professorial novel (“the reader/writer in me somehow got uncoupled, . . . write though I am able”). Readers will need to suspend their disbelief that a man so ruined outwardly could retain such elegance of thought (and expression) inwardly as Taylor (self-dubbed, also, Caruso, since he can sometimes still sing) hangs out in Central Park with his lovely Nicaraguan nurse Theresa—until he bites her, though even then he’s forgiven—imagines meetings with the likes of Walt Whitman and John Muir (who snatches his wallet), gradually senses the growing enormity of the distance between his pregnant lawyer wife Gina and himself (he’s also impotent)—and, finally, is dispatched to a rather upscale (it has a wonderful view) Hudson Valley institution for assisted living. What does it all mean? Taylor isn’t beyond theorizing—on the difference between sleep and wakefulness, for example (“between an intuitive impression of what encloses you and an empirically oriented ontology of existence”)—but by and large the wasties seem merely incurable, less so meaningful, and Reuss (Henry of Atlantic City, 1999, etc.), consequently, burdens his reader with a dreariness of situation that continues—and continues. Even Taylor succumbs to filler (“Which was fictional and timeless? Which was temporal and real? I could not have said. Nobody can”), and, try as one might, only the briefest flickers of feeling now and then stir the heart.
The largely academic riffs and worryings of a man humiliated by a dread inertia—but who still talk, talk, talks.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-42071-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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