Flashbacks at the ready, artist Violet Clay—thirtyish, jobless, broke, drinking heavily in her Manhattan digs—broods over life and Art as she sketches her latest freelance assignment in Gothic book jackets: "over two hundred women running away from houses." Violet has left (with little regret) the structures that would "contain" her—a mild husband, an affair, the prospect of a supermarket-and-babies marriage. Most baffling and frustrating however, are her elusive creative faculties, which seem to lie in a coma. But then Violet is abruptly plunged into the "winding passageways, and trap doors, and dark stairways" of her own fears—through someone else's tortured psyche and art. Her uncle Ambrose, last member of their unhappy and death-ridden Southern family, kills himself while living in a cottage in the woods. It was high-rise Ambrose who had first displayed Manhattan to Violet: "We have to make our impression down there but the real thing is the bird's eye view. . . You've got to go through me, kid." Yet Ambrose, who published one novel in his youth, could never leave those aerial fantasies for the street drudgery of work and deed; with the years, his possibilities simply ran out. Violet brings her own demons to the late Ambrose's cottage for her last mighty try to get past externals and appearances in her art, and she even plays out a mock suicide. Liberation arrives in the person of "Sam," a young woman who, after a cruel life, has "built her own house." And with Violet's portrait of Sam—who has survived hell—her drugged talent at last awakes to sing. Godwin's quick, amusingly sharp-tongued narrative assigns the feminist slant to a rich undertone rather than an overlay, making this a bright, but not uncompassionate scoring of the corrosive, self-pitying dramas we block out for ourselves when we live our lives as bad fiction.
Pub Date: May 16, 1978
ISBN: 034538993X
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1978
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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