Writer-film producer Shapiro’s engagingly breezy first novel describes, in parallel first-person narratives, the cultural collision of a sort of Out-of-Australia, feisty American woman and the Aussie rock musician who sends her away to save her life. Anyway, that’s his story. She is Rachel Ganelli, who leaves the rock band (Tall Poppies) she’s been rooming with Down Under, and returns to America, when an ex-band member is gunned down by the Mafia and everybody realizes that Rachel is a material witness. He is Colin, the group’s bassist, whose sexual allure is somewhat dimmed for Rachel when she eventually learns that he hatched the “demented Peggy Lee-inspired plot” meant to revive the Tall Poppies’ flagging celebrity. Meantime, the supposed dead man, Stuart, has shown up in America, and Rachel must enlist her reluctant brother and an old high school friend to help Stuart kick his heroin habit. Then Rachel’s parents unexpectedly return from their vacation, Rachel gets jury duty and is sequestered to consider the fate of an unlikely suburban murderess (“We’re not buying the saintly grandmother act. She’ll get life”). These and other agreeably ludicrous misadventures are brought to a more or less satisfying conclusion (did I mention that Tall Poppies gets a gig in New York City ?) in a disarmingly loose novel that wanders amicably all through Rachel’s and Colin’s histories, fantasies, and respective fixations on each one’s indigenous music, film, and TV culture. Shapiro’s high-concept premise pays off in a truckload of enjoyable gags (the title denotes a favorite practical joke), hilarious characterizations (the good-natured, essentially moribund Stuart is particularly entertaining), and irresistible non sequiturs (“Hannah started converting her cats to vegetarianism”). And it should surprise nobody when the story climaxes with a coincidence straight out of the 18th-century novel. The Unexpected Salami is a hell of a mess, but has commendable energy and marches along smartly to its own arrhythmic, offbeat beat.
Pub Date: May 5, 1998
ISBN: 1-56512-194-5
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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