It’s not subtle, but it works. Whenever Oates (Middle Age, p. 970, etc.) composes at this length, she doesn’t pad or...
Oates’s newest novella is a tale of academe similar to (though darker than) such earlier books as The Hungry Ghosts (1974) and American Appetites (1989).
The story begins and ends in Paris, in the Louvre, where protagonist Gillian Brauer observes a garishly expressionistic “totem” that triggers buried memories of her college years. Oates thereafter moves backward and forward in time and among a catastrophic 1975 house fire in a college community in Massachusetts’s Berkshire Mountains, the events leading up to it, and Gillian’s conflicted feelings about the couple who “adopted” her, and her own inchoate sensibility and sexuality. At Catamount College for Women, in the wake of the permissive, volatile late 1960s, Gillian falls under the spell of her literature professor Andre Harrow, a charismatic (if vaguely goatish) mentor who chants D.H. Lawrence’s “voluptuous” verses to his poetry-writing seminar students, and teasingly addresses withdrawn Gillian as “Philomela” (a telling allusion to Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Meanwhile, a series of small fires set by an uncaught arsonist terrifies Catamount’s students (two of whom happen to be named Sibyl and Cassandra)—as Gillian finds herself attracted as well to Harrow’s sultry French wife Dorcas, a sculptress whose powerfully animistic, “primitive and dramatic” half-human figures hewed out of wood hint at elemental experiences Gillian is only beginning to imagine. Their correlative is Andre’s classroom mantra “Go deeper. Go for the jugular.” As Gillian becomes the latest of a number of students made the Harrows’ sexual and domestic slaves, Andre’s imperative that artists must acknowledge their pagan, animal natures and act accordingly is ironically fulfilled as is the motto engraved on Dorcas’s creations: “WE ARE BEASTS AND THIS IS OUR CONSOLATION.”
It’s not subtle, but it works. Whenever Oates (Middle Age, p. 970, etc.) composes at this length, she doesn’t pad or overwrite. The result is a cunning fusion of Gothic romance and psychological horror story, and one of her best recent books.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0896-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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