A stripped-down novella about a man’s last sailing trip with his terminally ill brother. The narrator, who sounds an awful lot like the author—he’s a middle-aged lawyer named Joe with three children who’s had some success with crime novels that bear a certain resemblance to Felony Murder (1995) and Shoot the Moon (1997)—begins with a foreword claiming that the story he’s about to tell is true, based on the sea log he kept 15 years ago when he joined his younger brother Jack, 39, on a trip aboard the 36-foot sloop Sea Legs to distant Walker Island. Despite his inexperience as a sailor, Joe welcomes Jack’s invitation as a sign that he’s turning away from thoughts of the unspecified fatal disease he’s been diagnosed with to more constructive celebrations of life. And the two men begin their 1500-mile cruise across the Atlantic celebrating with all the calculated midlife abandon of John Cassavettes heroes. They hug each other, they revisit the scenes of their shared youth, they share banalities about first love, they sail through a wicked storm, they enjoy the chance to reverse their typical roles, with Jack playing captain and his older brother the first mate. As Joe says, however, “I’m a great believer in omens,” and his presentation throughout is so weightily metaphoric that few readers will share his surprise when Jack tells him that there is no Walker Island; the spot is just the arbitrary latitude and longitude Jack’s picked to slip off the sloop, leaving Joe to sail back home alone. Frantic to talk his brother out of his plan, and convinced that his legal training and his closeness to his brother make him the ideal person for the job, Joe tries every argument he can think of. In the manner of a seagoing ‘Night, Brother, Jack has unsurprising answers for every one. Though the treatment is more sincere than arresting, most readers will know on their own whether they want to hear the two brothers play out an argument that usually goes on inside one person.
Pub Date: Aug. 14, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18563-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
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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