That’s a rare philosophical observation in an overwrought work that puts sensationalism ahead of vision.
Star quarterback, apostate priest, CEO, whore. They’re a motley crew with a common fate in store: humiliation.
Keating’s dark debut offers a parade of characters but no plot. They live in a postindustrial city, a dismal place where feral dogs prowl the streets. A Jesuit school is all that remains of its former glory. The richly endowed school’s attempt at urban renewal is a spanking new football stadium, but don’t expect a full-bore satire about this deal between God’s messengers and Mammon. Instead, Keating zeroes in on Frank McSweeney, the massive quarterback who will surely lead his team to victory in the game of the season, set for the Day of the Dead, right after Halloween. Doesn’t happen. At a Halloween party in a flophouse, degenerate senior Will de Vere offers Frank, already drunk and stoned, a treat: the banged-up-but-still-feisty whore, Tamar. Next day, Frank is a wreck, the game lost, the season over. His humiliation is total but not worth dwelling on; Keating has many more victims lined up. There’s the coach, forced to pay his flophouse rent by bedding his landlady, “this tusked and taloned tarn-hag.” (Hyperbole is Keating’s trademark.) There’s Will’s father, Edward, CEO and school donor, now facing bankruptcy. He’s enjoying oral sex in a cab with Tamar when the cops arrest them; the fallen titan must then service his cellmates. Father and son will both meet grisly ends. There's no protagonist in this panorama of depravity, though the school looms over the action. Its priests are sinners too (their housekeeper is also their procuress), but only one of them is punished, the apostate Father Loomis, who has married off his most pious students to a bunch of prostitutes. “Life uses us as battering rams, one person against the other, and few…escape the catastrophe,” comments the omniscient narrator, or puppet master.
That’s a rare philosophical observation in an overwrought work that puts sensationalism ahead of vision.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-6927-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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