Tries too hard to do too much but is likable anyway.
A boy with a tragic past comes of age in Las Vegas.
"Asians can't figure me out, and it drives them nuts. I'm like Asian, but stretched tall. Long body, small features. Curly dark hair. Like one of those long-necked aliens with a wig." Self-esteem is not Walter Stahl's long suit, but at 17, he hasn't had much to make him feel good about himself. His mother, Emily, took off when he was 5 in the wake of a tragedy that left his father, already damaged by loss, ruined beyond repair. Imagining that Emily has fled to Las Vegas, father and son follow her there—but the years pass without any sign. These days, Walter is scanning for Vietnamese-looking women among the visitors who tour the Viva Las Vegas! museum, where he's a guide. In parallel with his tale is woven an earlier narrative, one that tracks Emily from the time she backed out of the driveway in her blue Volvo and hit the road. Parts of the story are told in graphic novel form, which works quite well, and there are also reproductions of pages from Walter's sketchbook. His favorite subjects are two human statues at the Venice Venice hotel, Apollo and Diana, who turn out to be a brother and sister from Greece. "I've spent hours studying his body....the deep cleft of his hairless chest, the line that begins at his hip and swoops down to touch upon his fig leaf and curve back up to the other hip, that shadow that runs along the side of his thigh from his knee to the perfect roundness of his ass...." Clearly, Walter's on the verge of learning something new about himself. Sie's debut novel is a bit weighed down by all the darkness he's loaded in: there are too many deaths and betrayals, too many back stories and digressions, too many Greek myths; also, it's disappointing when a major plotline turns out to be a fantasy.
Tries too hard to do too much but is likable anyway.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05566-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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