Grand entertainments all and a pleasure.
An ascended master of the form returns to the novella, turning in three very different pieces with autobiographical elements in common.
“To be honest, which often I am not,” Harrison (The Big Seven, 2014, etc.) writes in a telling phrase early on, announcing good intentions while reserving the prerogatives of invention. Yet, the lead of the title story, minstrel and mongrel alike, is someone very like Harrison, challenged of eye but not of vision and a trencherman and drinker of formidable appetites and no real interest in scaling back to better fit his advancing years. The big book he has been promising his publisher is slow to emerge, just as his abilities at 70 are beginning to show their age, causing him to ponder the prospects of using performance-enhancement pills and of quitting the writerly world to raise pigs. He settles for trying to write poems instead, inconclusively; as Harrison writes, “Life is short on conclusions and that’s why it’s often a struggle to end a poem.” Some of Harrison’s lines are throwaways, though a less accomplished writer would love to have written them; but in the main, he writes with his customary rough grace and bodhisattva wisdom, whether comically treating sexual improprieties or reflecting deeply on the meaning of life. As with Dalva, Harrison is skilled at writing from a woman’s point of view, and his second story, set in Montana and across the water in England, concerns a woman, Catherine, who likes nothing better than twitting her moneyed neighbors; she, too, shares biographical points with Harrison, from a love for steak to a fondness for Key West. The closing story, “The Case of the Howling Buddhas,” is a touch short for a novella and slighter than the other pieces, a Pynchon-esque goof involving one Detective Sunderson (of The Great Leader fame) who’s on the trail of some bad actors inside a cult-y sangha but is never too busy not to ogle the long legs of a neighbor—trademark Harrison territory, in other words.
Grand entertainments all and a pleasure.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2456-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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