This is a colorful, ambitious first outing that recalls Dylan Thomas’ comment on Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds: “Just...
Drink, drugs, and religion are the familiar demons hounding young and old in Cork City, Ireland, where an accidental murder darkens several lives in this vibrant debut.
When Maureen kills an intruder in her home, her gangster son, Jimmy, hires an old buddy named Tony to help dispose of the corpse. The victim, a drug addict named Robbie, had been living with a prostitute named Georgie, who worked in the building where Maureen lives when it was a brothel and who makes a drug buy through local madam Tara. That’s how Georgie comes to know the young dealer Ryan, Tony’s son, who one day succumbs to Tara’s charms, as she lives next door and he is seeking respite from his father’s violence. As the narrative meanders across some five years in a depressed economy that forces many to choose “between the airport and the dole queue,” fate treats few of these players kindly. Ryan does jail time, Tony and Georgie try rehab, and two unplanned pregnancies emerge. Jimmy’s concern that his mother’s homicide will be revealed by Tony, Tara, or Georgie produces a rising tension that leads to more than one ending and two awkward flashbacks. Amid an exceptional cast, Ryan has too many facets and doesn’t quite gel, as victim or rising hood. The three main women are all well-drawn figures, with Maureen a real standout amid so much dependency, a refreshing maverick full of scathing comments on religion and hypocrisy. There’s other challenging language here, be warned, both obscenity and slang, which might be harsh or unwelcome to some ears but also, like the Irish English McInerney composes, possesses its own enticing music.
This is a colorful, ambitious first outing that recalls Dylan Thomas’ comment on Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds: “Just the book to give your sister, if she is a dirty, boozey girl.”Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8041-8906-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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
Despite some distractions, there’s an irresistible charm to Owens’ first foray into nature-infused romantic fiction.
A wild child’s isolated, dirt-poor upbringing in a Southern coastal wilderness fails to shield her from heartbreak or an accusation of murder.
“The Marsh Girl,” “swamp trash”—Catherine “Kya” Clark is a figure of mystery and prejudice in the remote North Carolina coastal community of Barkley Cove in the 1950s and '60s. Abandoned by a mother no longer able to endure her drunken husband’s beatings and then by her four siblings, Kya grows up in the careless, sometimes-savage company of her father, who eventually disappears, too. Alone, virtually or actually, from age 6, Kya learns both to be self-sufficient and to find solace and company in her fertile natural surroundings. Owens (Secrets of the Savanna, 2006, etc.), the accomplished co-author of several nonfiction books on wildlife, is at her best reflecting Kya’s fascination with the birds, insects, dappled light, and shifting tides of the marshes. The girl’s collections of shells and feathers, her communion with the gulls, her exploration of the wetlands are evoked in lyrical phrasing which only occasionally tips into excess. But as the child turns teenager and is befriended by local boy Tate Walker, who teaches her to read, the novel settles into a less magical, more predictable pattern. Interspersed with Kya’s coming-of-age is the 1969 murder investigation arising from the discovery of a man’s body in the marsh. The victim is Chase Andrews, “star quarterback and town hot shot,” who was once Kya’s lover. In the eyes of a pair of semicomic local police officers, Kya will eventually become the chief suspect and must stand trial. By now the novel’s weaknesses have become apparent: the monochromatic characterization (good boy Tate, bad boy Chase) and implausibilities (Kya evolves into a polymath—a published writer, artist, and poet), yet the closing twist is perhaps its most memorable oddity.
Despite some distractions, there’s an irresistible charm to Owens’ first foray into nature-infused romantic fiction.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1909-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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