Quirky characters are a dime a dozen, but truly believable, lovable ones are not—a fact that makes Landvik's (Patty Jane's House of Curl, 1995) latest slice of American life a genuine pleasure. As chapters are narrated alternately by several characters, the reader swiftly becomes privy to the secrets of many in cozy White Falls, Minnesota. Lifelong friends Devera and BiDi are handling the rapid approach to 40 in their own unique ways: BiDi maintains a youthful zest by speeding through life, tossing off zinging one-liners along the way, while Devera begins a tawdry, slightly embarrassing affair with scrawny and supercilious Gerhart Ludwig, her night-class history professor. Blissfully ignorant, Devera's husband Dick happily runs the family Cadillac dealership and dreams of opening a swanky nightclub: Your Oasis on Flame Lake. BiDi's charismatic second husband Sergio (first husband Big Mike ran off to be born again) is successfully launching a chain of gourmet cake shops and conducting an innocent long-term affair. Darcy—Dick and Devera's hat-loving, show-tune-singing younger daughter—offers her sardonic take on events as well. Life rolls along in pithy fashion (Landvik was a stand-up comic) until more serious events encroach on the fun: Francesca, the oversize hockey playing daughter of BiDi, is beaten by hooligans one summer night and left for dead by the side of the road. Miraculously, she makes her own way to the hospital, where BiDi (who's disconcerted at no longer being the center of attention) and Sergio (who deeply loves his stepdaughter) soothe her and envision their revenge. The punches, and punchlines, keep coming: Dick finds out from the professor about Devera's quickie affair, and BiDi and Sergio's long-hoped-for son is born two months premature with a hole in his heart—helping make the end, which is happy, seem somewhat arbitrary. Still, in all, the perfect light and entertaining summer novel. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-449-91278-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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