by Jake Lamar ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 2001
Lamar (Closer to the Bone, 1999, etc.) does the social satire deftly, the whodunit a bit clumsily. But the real strength...
Even before his 34th birthday, Professor Clay Robinette is a happily married, safely tenured black professor at a better-than-average university. So, of course, it’s at this point that his comfortable, carefully ordered world goes drastically topsy-turvy—that 6 becomes 9, as it were. The fateful call that rouses Clay past midnight is from Reggie Brogus, once a famous black radical, now an infamous black conservative who sounds panicked, in desperate need of a friend. In a weak moment, Clay makes the mistake of agreeing to be one. On a couch in Reggie’s office at the Afrikamerica department lies a strangled white student. A frame, swears Reggie. The federal government wants to discredit and silence him because he knows where the bodies are buried. But as Clay looks more closely at this particular body, he recognizes his illicit lover and realizes he’s about to become the prime suspect in her slaying. But who else had reason to kill pretty Jenny Wolfsheim? The militant black student who’s been stalking her? Government spooks, in the interests of the conspiracy Reggie Brogus claims is directed at him? Or is Brogus bogus, lying to hide his own culpability? Clay had better find out fast before those pointing fingers become a mailed fist.
Lamar (Closer to the Bone, 1999, etc.) does the social satire deftly, the whodunit a bit clumsily. But the real strength here lies in his often feckless, always candid, deeply unheroic hero, hollow yet irresistibly human.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60537-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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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 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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