Elegant and melancholy yet surprisingly optimistic, warmed by full-bodied characterizations and expert delineation of...
A modern-day Rosenkavalier, as atmospherically situated among Manhattan’s affluent Jewish elite as the Strauss opera was among Vienna’s aristocrats.
In the sexy opening scene, 48-year-old Marian Kahn is making love with 26-year-old Oliver Stern while late-afternoon traffic blares on Park Avenue below her apartment. She’s a married history professor at Columbia who’s written a surprise bestseller about an 18th-century American adventuress; he runs an ultra-chic Village flower shop called The White Rose and is the son of her oldest friend. Their midday idyll turns to farce with the unannounced arrival of Marian’s stuffy cousin, Barton Ochstein, come to boast of his engagement to Sophie Klein, a Columbia grad student (doing her thesis on an anti-Nazi group called the White Rose) whose super-rich but definitely-not-Our-Crowd father Mort is eager to find a gentlemanly caretaker for his daughter and his billions. Funny, Marian had always assumed Barton was gay, and he certainly takes a lascivious interest in Oliver, who’s scrambled into some of Marian’s clothes and a wig to introduce himself as her assistant Olivia. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess that “Olivia” will play a role in scuttling Barton’s unsuitable match with intellectual, unworldly Sophie, but this is the only clumsy note in an otherwise deftly plotted narrative. Koreltiz (The Sabbathday River, 1999, etc.) provides glimpses of her characters’ pasts to explain their motivations, she shows people changing in ways that are sometimes painful but usually necessary and always plausible, she makes Oliver’s and Sophie’s youthful confusions as compelling as Marian’s middle-aged ruefulness. The supporting cast is equally well-imagined (though Marian’s husband should have been more than an offstage presence), and the author provides knowledgeable background material on everything from the New York publishing scene to the Rockefeller drug laws. In crisp, unsentimental prose, she gently traces the inevitable disintegration of Marian’s affair with Oliver and shows both of them making new commitments, which will come as a relief to readers who have grown to really care about these people and hope for their happiness.
Elegant and melancholy yet surprisingly optimistic, warmed by full-bodied characterizations and expert delineation of complex emotions.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4013-5231-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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