NOVEL EXPLOSIVES

Name: NOVEL EXPLOSIVES
Author: Jim Gauer
ISBN: 978-1-55713-433-2

by Jim Gauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2016

There’s a lot of verbal and postmodern high jinks in these 700-plus pages, and they will likely strain anyone’s patience and...

bookshelf

A man with amnesia and $20 million, a well-read venture capitalist adrift after a hot deal, and two drug lord gunmen combine to perform a time-twisting minuet in this big, brainy, trippy, Technicolor noir of a debut.

Take Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace at their densest, some Malcolm Lowry–esque south-of-the-border malevolence and lots of technobabble, financial arcana, and myriad ad hoc drivel sessions—that may start to suggest what Gauer is up to here. The core story is simple, but he breaks it up and reassembles it with two narrative voices, assorted time jumps, a cool shift in point of view, and a compulsion to spin out every basic element across dozens of pages while exploring the outré entries of the English lexicon. It begins with a man waking up in a Guanajuato, Mexico, hotel. He has a bump on his head and no memory of his identity. His wallet tells him he bears the same name as a pseudonym of the early-20th-century Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (Gauer is a poet and, not incidentally, a venture capitalist). A local banker tells him he has almost $20 million in his account. When the narrative—covering the week of April 13 to 20 in 2009—shifts to the gunmen, they are assigned by their Shakespeare-quoting boss (“Guy’s like two-thirds Money, one-third Thesaurus”) to comb through El Paso and Juarez for a guy who has a lot of the boss’s money, part of a laundering operation that also somehow entails the VC’s latest hot and dubious deal. It’s only when the VC flies to El Paso and embarks on a phantasmagoric road trip south that key players and plot points begin to coalesce. The closing pages include one horrific scene that unfortunately is later replayed and an epic Mexican standoff that more or less starts with a man citing Ovid, Schopenhauer, and Heidegger within six lines.

There’s a lot of verbal and postmodern high jinks in these 700-plus pages, and they will likely strain anyone’s patience and commitment, but for readers who enjoy this kind of thing, it will be worth the effort.

Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-55713-433-2

Page Count: 722

Publisher: Zerogram Press

Review Posted Online: July 31, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GOLDFINCH
by Donna Tartt

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE FRIEND
by Donna Tartt

- SEEN & HEARD
Podcast Will Explore Bennington College Lit Trio

- SEEN & HEARD
‘The Secret History’ Is New ‘Today’ Book Club Pick

- SEEN & HEARD
Jenna Bush Hager Launching Author Podcast

bookshelf

THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

bookshelf

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.