What wants to be a transgressive thunderclap ends up a mildly diverting exercise.
Third-century emperor and twenty-first-century academic find they’ve got oh-so-much in common.
From a.d. 218 to 221, Rome’s emperor was an unlikely teenager with the unusually (even for Rome) tongue-tangling name of Heliogabalus. In the very early part of the new millennium in London, the much more simply named Jim is working on his university thesis about—you guessed it—Heliogabalus. In his introduction to this time-skipping tale, Reed (Pleasure Chateau, 2000, etc., not reviewed) mentions that he’s intent on a method whereby the past will dissolve into the present, and vice versa, in the manner of a Derek Jarman film. It’s an unfortunate but all-too-apt comparison, as the ensuing pages can have a tendency to be too mindful of Jarman’s film Edward II—another example of a renegade artist trying to reclaim a previously vilified gay historical figure by melding time periods but getting impossibly lost in the labyrinth of its own baroque mechanics. With all that said, Heliogabalus is an undeniably fascinating character who deserves a full recounting of his reign (though he was reimagined in a 1933 Artaud work, albeit as quite more violent than the dreamy-eyed pinup boy that Reed makes him into). Half of the book is given over to his interior recollections, and it gets quite a bit of steam out of the sheer magnitude of Heliogabalus’s anarchic plans. When the action shifts forward to London and the just-as-self-obsessed Jim (except he has a thing for designer labels, whereas the emperor was obsessed with color-coding gargantuan feasts), the narrative skips and stutters, abandoning the fragrant rhythms previously established in the ancient world. Reed has no problem dropping anachronisms like “rent boy” into the Rome-set text, a stratagem that seems too clever by half, and when Jim’s and Heliogabalus’s worlds start to meld forcefully, the whole thing collapses under the strain of its own pretension.
What wants to be a transgressive thunderclap ends up a mildly diverting exercise.Pub Date: May 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-7206-1193-8
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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
Despite some distractions, there’s an irresistible charm to Owens’ first foray into nature-infused romantic fiction.
A wild child’s isolated, dirt-poor upbringing in a Southern coastal wilderness fails to shield her from heartbreak or an accusation of murder.
“The Marsh Girl,” “swamp trash”—Catherine “Kya” Clark is a figure of mystery and prejudice in the remote North Carolina coastal community of Barkley Cove in the 1950s and '60s. Abandoned by a mother no longer able to endure her drunken husband’s beatings and then by her four siblings, Kya grows up in the careless, sometimes-savage company of her father, who eventually disappears, too. Alone, virtually or actually, from age 6, Kya learns both to be self-sufficient and to find solace and company in her fertile natural surroundings. Owens (Secrets of the Savanna, 2006, etc.), the accomplished co-author of several nonfiction books on wildlife, is at her best reflecting Kya’s fascination with the birds, insects, dappled light, and shifting tides of the marshes. The girl’s collections of shells and feathers, her communion with the gulls, her exploration of the wetlands are evoked in lyrical phrasing which only occasionally tips into excess. But as the child turns teenager and is befriended by local boy Tate Walker, who teaches her to read, the novel settles into a less magical, more predictable pattern. Interspersed with Kya’s coming-of-age is the 1969 murder investigation arising from the discovery of a man’s body in the marsh. The victim is Chase Andrews, “star quarterback and town hot shot,” who was once Kya’s lover. In the eyes of a pair of semicomic local police officers, Kya will eventually become the chief suspect and must stand trial. By now the novel’s weaknesses have become apparent: the monochromatic characterization (good boy Tate, bad boy Chase) and implausibilities (Kya evolves into a polymath—a published writer, artist, and poet), yet the closing twist is perhaps its most memorable oddity.
Despite some distractions, there’s an irresistible charm to Owens’ first foray into nature-infused romantic fiction.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1909-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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