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LIGHTNING SONG

The folksy and always entertaining Nordan (The Sharpshooter Blues, 1995, etc.) returns with his latest wild ride of the imagination, this time drawing his knee-slapping laughs from the disparity between a 12-year-old boy's point of view and the adult events he witnesses one volatile summer in rural Mississippi. The summer lightning storms that strike throughout the novel not only throw everything into a new light, but also seem to inspire some down-home madness. Odd sexual doings and outpourings of desire and need are particularly amusing when seen through the eyes of Leroy Dearman, an awkward boy given to inappropriate outbursts and off-the-wall commentary. He lives on a llama farm with his parents and two younger sisters. His dad, Swami Don, crippled in one arm since youth, is otherwise solid and phlegmatic, a teetotaling, God-fearing farmer and night watchman. Leroy's mother, Elsie, though, a romantic, is easily charmed by the arrival of Don's younger brother, Harris, a flashy, handsome, heavy- drinking, trash-talking smoothy just separated from his wife for his infidelities. His cocktail hour repartee and knowledge of the greater world seduce the bored and lonely Elsie, who misunderstands Harris's compulsive flirtations. While his parents act out their domestic drama, the young Leroy discovers some harsh truths about sexuality himself, first from his uncle's stash of skin mags, then from his crush on a buxom, baton-twirling high-school girl who actually fulfills his wildest fantasy. With the household in disarray and the llamas threatened by a pack of wild dogs—Swami Don rises to the occasion. A long, wild rant reveals his true passions—for love, llamas, lightning, and family. His romantic soul reminds his wife that ``true love lasts forever.'' Hardly sentimental, Nordan's idiosyncratic fiction delights in its ragged edges—the tall tales, the wacky set pieces, the flat- out bizarre behavior. (First serial to Harper's; author tour)

Pub Date: May 23, 1997

ISBN: 1-56512-084-1

Page Count: 280

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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OF MICE AND MEN

Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.

This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define.  Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936

ISBN: 0140177396

Page Count: 83

Publisher: Covici, Friede

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936

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