A splendid, relentlessly suspenseful fictional examination of centuries of cruelty, frustration, and disasters, both natural...
Astonishingly accomplished debut pits a fiercely independent, emotionally scarred descendant of rapacious Oregon ranchers against members of the Nez Perce Indian tribe—in a courtroom battle for the ownership of land that is sacred to both.
On the same day that her mother dies of a lingering brain cancer, Iris Steele gets a registered letter informing her she's being sued by members of the Nez Perce over the ownership of a portion of her family's cattle ranch known to both her family, and the Indians, as the Heart of the Beast. After burying her mother in the family plot that holds her father and brother, Iris, 28, stoically brings in the wheat crop, but can't suppress memories of her horrifically dysfunctional family. Haunted by her emotionally abusive mother Elise, her brutally sadistic father Ike, her sensitive but doomed brother Jake, she finds herself unburdening her grief to 70-year-old Aunt Hanna, who emerges from a 30-year stay in an insane asylum to complete a series of sculptures of the family. Iris toys with giving up the ranch since, with the rare exception of the love and loss of her brother's best friend Henry, ranching has been for her an almost unending history of terrifying violence (a scene in which a harvesting combine explodes and turns wheat fields into a raging holocaust is a masterpiece of edge-of-the-seat action prose) and exploitation going all the way back to her Norwegian pioneer ancestors. She decides to fight for the land, though, because events, within her family, and in the larger history of the region, suggest that the crimes and rapacity isolating whites from Indians are not as clearly drawn as both sides would want to admit. As Hanna completes her sculptures and the courtroom confrontation wounds everyone, Iris resolves her traumatic past in a single, selfless act.
A splendid, relentlessly suspenseful fictional examination of centuries of cruelty, frustration, and disasters, both natural and man-made, played out against a pitiless, magnificently dangerous northwestern landscape.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1179-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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