High drama, low impact.
Solidly written though unexceptional first novel about a mother and her four daughters fighting for respect in an Alabama town.
Hattie Bohannon, owner of the only truck-stop in Maridoches (and the place for Gert’s special brand of high-fat cooking) is putting her life back together after the death of her husband a few years before. Testing the dating waters with Sheriff Paul Dodd, Hattie is trying to move past mourning despite the lack of closure—the VA has “misplaced” her late husband’s remains, though that’s a small concern considering that Hattie’s oldest daughter, Jessamine (the true mother of Hattie’s youngest “daughter,” Heather) is having an affair with a married man. When the guilty husband confesses his sins at the Church of the Holy Resurrection, Hattie and daughters are branded as harlots and the truck-stop declared a hotbed of sin. The Reverend Peterson, plagued by erotic fantasies of fat, middle-aged Gert and thrown out of bed by his newly feminist wife, who has taken to painting portraits of snakes, begins a campaign to shut down the truck-stop café, while a group of church businessmen plan to build a Christian steakhouse in its place. This brand of southern novel, packed with down-home eccentrics, is often dependent on the strength of its characters, but neither Hattie nor her daughters are ever as interesting as the bit players—Gert, the Reverend’s wife, strange old Jewell Miller, who has stolen Oakley Bohannon’s ashes—leaving what transpires for the Bohannon women not half as compelling as it should be. Town gossip is vicious, and soon the three older Bohannon girls rebel in their own ways, Jessamine joining the church and becoming born again (though right after the baptism she sleeps with Sheriff Dodd), Darla joining the Army, and Connie nearly killing a man. Hattie is vindicated by end, even though the Christian steakhouse rises from the ashes of the truck-stop.
High drama, low impact.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-87113-855-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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
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
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