As one Crace character puts it, “Life is uncertain. Eat the pudding first.” Readers would be well advised not to bypass a...
The award-winning British author of such inventive and memorable fiction as Quarantine (1997) and Being Dead (2000) enters new territory with this beguiling collection of 64 very short stories about what may as well be called the metaphysics of food.
Crace prefaces these untitled pieces with a tantalizing pseudo-biblical epigraph including the orotund declaration, “Nor is there honey in the devil’s larder.” Then he treats us to freely ranging anecdotes (some a single paragraph, none more than a half-dozen pages) that dramatize with terse wit the exigencies of appetite and custom as expressed in both seemingly realistic and expressly parabolic terms. Several take the form of generic character contrast: a woman who finds love in middle age simultaneously develops the healthy appetite denied the withdrawn younger woman listening to her story; a private club’s dining-room manager punishes his staff for the same breaches of etiquette he finds himself compulsively committing; and a truculent, self-denying health faddist who preached that “Migraines are occasioned by modern life” is remembered by the jaded voluptuary who long outlives her. Echoes of Kafka, Borges, Cortázar, and the Kosinski of Steps are heard in such shapely fables as the tale of a celebrated restaurant that scorns to serve food whose patrons nevertheless pay handsomely to soak up its unique ambience (“It celebrated emptiness in an otherwise sated world”); a vision of God observing innocents plucking bitter crab apples from a “forbidden” tree; and an erotic roundelay in which dining companions play “Strip Fondue,” impulsively subjecting themselves to “the scorching treachery of cheese.” The “lessons” of these sophisticated stories might have been devised by an epicurean Aesop who wisely balances the pleasures of seizing the day with a resigned understanding of the vanity and evanescence of sensual gratification.
As one Crace character puts it, “Life is uncertain. Eat the pudding first.” Readers would be well advised not to bypass a morsel of this sumptuous fictional feast.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-13859-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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