While it’s much more than a love story, Palladio is chiefly about love. Heartache, though, is the true coin in this realm.
Two separated lovers are set on a collision course, in a trenchant fourth novel by the author of, most recently, St. Famous (1996).
Dee makes approaches from opposite ends of the time spectrum to tell the story of Molly and John. First, there’s John Wheelright, a young New York ad executive in a modest crisis about the direction his life is (or isn’t) taking. He has a comfortable job, a good wage, and a no-stress girlfriend, but he’s at a loss for a greater purpose. Things fly into a tizzy when he gets a sudden offer: Mal Osbourne, a reclusive mad genius of the advertising world, is starting up a groundbreaking new firm in Charlottesville. Then, from the other end of the time continuum, there’s the grimmer story of Molly Howe. Molly is a disaffected child growing up in the tiny, depressed town of Ulster, New York. Given her distant parents and somewhat troubled nature, it isn’t a surprise when she becomes a sullen and rebellious adolescent, eventually getting caught in flagrante delicto. Eager to be rid of her, Molly’s parents pack her off to Berkeley, where she stays with her older brother Richard, a born-again, commune-living Christian. Without paying tuition, she sneaks into university classes and there makes friends with John Wheelwright at a younger age. Soon they’re living together in an uneasy meshing of Molly’s brooding, guilt-ridden self and John’s polite desire to help. Molly eventually goes AWOL, breaking John’s heart, though their paths will again cross at Palladio, a dreamlike place where the messianic Osbourne extols the creation of advertising that is really modern art. Dee’s prose can transcend the sometime contrivances of his own tale: Whether describing the economic ravaging of a dying small town or the minute details of a troubled relationship, he hits the nail on the head time and again.
While it’s much more than a love story, Palladio is chiefly about love. Heartache, though, is the true coin in this realm.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50179-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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