Very much a first novel with gusts of feeling and dervish-like direction.
Interminably solipsistic and frequently caustic novel debut about a ’70s college graduate’s first year of sexual conflict. The author has honed her craft in two story collections that are snappier (Darling?, 2001, etc.).
Having grown up on a farm in Connecticut sets naïve scholarship student Beatrice Wolfe apart from her swanky classmates at Vassar-like Sweetriver College in upstate New York. The stories Beatrice tells of her emotionally dramatic mother and banal, entrepreneurial father offer mordant raw material to her bossy lesbian comparative literature professor Philippa Sayres, who takes her young student seriously—for the first time in Beatrice’s life—by having a brief but meaningful affair with her. But thrust out in the real world upon graduation, and rejected by Philippa, Beatrice has to make a living by her liberal-arts education. Moving, inexplicably, to Hartford, and coming out of the closet to her nonplussed family, which begins to disintegrate on its own, Beatrice takes jobs in succession on a dietary assembly line in a nursing home, a women’s clothing shop, and, with final poetic justice, in the city’s public library. Beatrice’s involvement with a quirky, obsessive-compulsive insurance administrator, Lee, becomes her first defiant act of lesbianism. Meanwhile, Beatrice’s mother is divorcing her dad (and becomes involved with her teenaged student); one sister, 16-year-old Sylvie, gets pregnant and lives in a trailer with an ex-con; and another sister, Dolly, moves out to Wyoming protectively with Dad only to get hit by lightning. Schmidt’s chirpy dialogue imbues her characters with colorful vibrancy—Ma and Philippa, for example—while Beatrice’s bisexual torment is palpable, if irritating (“Once you were a lesbian, dreams came true,” she says cheerfully). Or has she found true love with her male boss and former addict with the snake tattoo, Stetson Tortola? There are a lot more sad, dotty, touching stories here, making for a long-winded, noisy narrative that simulates the mid-’70s Zeitgeist.
Very much a first novel with gusts of feeling and dervish-like direction.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-28177-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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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