Telling stories about a privileged world, Auchincloss doesn’t belie the intellectual and material luxuriousness his...
A dry martini of a collection from an author who, in his 57th book, voices his characters with a precision and care almost unheard of in a sloppy age.
While the stories here span the better part of the 20th century, they nevertheless hew to Auchincloss’s familiar aristocratic settings (Her Infinite Variety, 2000, etc.), generally New York’s Knickerbocker elite. “All That May Become a Man” is set in the Vollard clan, who for the most part occupy themselves with living lives—on the hunt or in war—of a dangerousness that would almost make Teddy Roosevelt quake. The narrator, who disappoints his father by avoiding service in WWI, is the sole man of the family without an adventurous spirit. Years later, his mother tells him to have the courage simply to admit that he was afraid to die, and refuses to let him off the hook: “No one is born fearless. Your father made himself a hero by grit and will power. And don’t you ever dare to take it from him!” “The Marriage Broker” manages to tell a story of arranged marriage amid the wealthy classes without resorting to the commonplace moral dilemmas. A somewhat more modern piece, “The Justice Clerk,” is a recounting of a man’s journey from being an enthusiastic clerk for a Supreme Court justice during the New Deal to being a man disgusted with both the right (the justice) and the left (his Stalinist wife); he determines to “lose myself in the blessed impersonality of taxes.” Praiseworthy in so delectable a volume are its wit and economy, but equally deserving of mention is Auchincloss’s approachability. While his characters dwell in the upper latitudes of wealth and breeding, he doesn’t give readers entry to this world in a voyeuristic fashion, so there’s little in the way of breathless recountings of fabulous parties, dinners, and journeys.
Telling stories about a privileged world, Auchincloss doesn’t belie the intellectual and material luxuriousness his characters live in, but neither does he ever stoop to revel in them.Pub Date: July 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-15289-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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