by Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2004
Scholarship as romance: intricate, erudite, and intensely pleasurable.
A Renaissance mystery rattles the lives of four Princeton roommates—in an astonishingly good debut by a young team of writers who have put their expensive educations to much better use than classmates who keep screwing up governments.
The mystery is the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a real Renaissance text that reads like six Handel operas after a bout in the food processor. Narrator Thomas Corelli Sullivan is one of four stout friends and roommates in their last year at Princeton. Before his accidental death, Sullivan’s father was himself obsessed by the headbusting puzzles built into the book by its anonymous author, and that obsession, nearly the ruin of his marriage, is now threatening Tom’s. Waifish Paul Harris, perhaps the most brilliant of the friends, building on the work of numerous scholars including Tom’s late father, has begun to crack the book’s codes, and his work has sucked Tom into a world he hoped to avoid. Neglecting his own studies and his immensely attractive girlfriend Katie, Tom lends his own formidable knowledge and intuition to Paul’s labors. Their findings seem to bear out the theories for which Tom’s father was ridiculed by Vincent Taft, a rival scholar now in residence down the road at the Institute for Advanced Studies, and the authorship seems clearly to have been that of Francesco Colonna, an aristocrat and member of the inner circle of great Florentine humanists. What remains elusive is the great mystery at the center of the text, which has to do with the location and purpose of an immense crypt Colonna had ordered up. Tom emerges from the intellectual hothouse just in time to save his degree and his love life, but Paul charges ahead until he, Tom, and the other two plucky roommates find themselves, without ever leaving Princeton, in extraordinary peril. Academic evil stalks the campus and no one is safe.
Scholarship as romance: intricate, erudite, and intensely pleasurable.Pub Date: May 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-33711-6
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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by Ian Caldwell
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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