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SENT FOR YOU YESTERDAY

Winner of the PEN Faulkner Award for 1984 when printed as a mass market paperback by Avon, this novel reappears now in hard covers from England. Wideman's achievement, without doubt, is ambitious, earnest, and passionate, and for these reasons it deserves high praise. But the book is harmed badly at the same time by its idolatrous and slavish imitation of Faulkner, which make it a museum piece. Set in the Homewood section of what is taken to be Pittsburgh, the novel chronicles the lives of the blacks who make what they can of their lives there, spanning a time from the new migrations of the 1930's to the backward-looking disillusionment of 1970. Albert Wilkes, jazz pianist and rootless seeker, is the legendary and symbolic foundation, as well as the doomed inspiration, for the lives of the others; having killed a white policeman, he is, after seven years of hiding, but still before the time of World War II, betrayed and hideously slain. Those growing up in the grip and omnipresence of his contradictory legacy include a central trio made up of the highly sexual Lucy Tate, her lifelong lover Carl French, and Lucy's adoptive brother, known only as "Brother Tate," who is an albino black with near-visionary gifts as musician and artist, but also with near-mad depths of emotion and despair, which cause him to become mute (after the "accidental" death, on the Fourth of July, by fire, of his own albino and illegitimate son) and sixteen years later to die, by suicide, under an oncoming train. Many readers, if willing to work for what they get, will be moved by this complex, intricate, and symbolic novel. Others will lament that it is not a new book at all, but Faulkner again, sprung into life half a century later, and talky.

Pub Date: June 1, 1985

ISBN: 0395877296

Page Count: 212

Publisher: Schocken

Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985

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CONCLAVE

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

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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