A comedy of manners (and the lack thereof) played out among the lumpenintelligentia of present-day London, by the English novelist (the Booker-nominated The Essence of the Thing, 1998) who seems best placed to inherit Iris Murdoch’s laurels. Barbara is one of those superlative underachievers who flourish like moss in the damp gloom of the British Isles. A college dropout who had hoped to become a historian of British India, Barbara drifts from odd job to odd job. It’s in this guise that she meets Alex Maclise, a Fleet Street journalist. Alex’s wife Claire, a busy media type, needs someone to mind the kids for a few weeks while she’s away on assignment, and Barbara is happy to step in. That’s mistake number one, and it leads in short order to mistake number two—falling in love with Alex. Naturally, mistake number three—an affair—follows in quick succession. But Barbara is not that easily swept away: She asks Alex to leave Claire for her and, when he refuses, breaks off the romance. Then she meets Andrew Flynn. An old university friend of Alex’s, Andrew is a mathematician only recently returned to Britain from the US, where he divorced his wife and left his children. Lonely and at loose ends, he falls for Barbara and pursues her. Although at first she accepts his advances, being with Andrew only makes her realize how much she prefers Alex. How do you get out of a blind alley? You can start by retracing your steps—which, in Barbara’s case, takes her to India (where her family had lived for generations) in search of enlightenment. No revelation presents itself, but Barbara does manage to get a job out of the whole thing when the BBC decides to make a documentary of her travels. Perhaps a career was all she needed? Witty, sharp, and extremely subtle, St. John manages to dissect modern society with no trace of either sentimentality or bile: a rare treat.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7867-0662-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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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