A debut made up much less of observed and felt life than of absorbed fiction. Let’s see what Knox does when he writes his...
The world of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan is re-created with a puzzling mixture of stylistic grace and slavish imitation, in a confident first novel by a young Australian writer.
That novel is also—as its epigraph and first sentence unmistakably announce—a detailed homage to Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, a classic portrayal of two marriages destroyed by adultery. “I am telling the story of my blindness and how I came to see,” observes Richard, the attorney (and methodical man par excellence) who narrates in retrospect the story of the ongoing friendship that bound him and his wife Phillippa (“Pup”—a would-be novelist) to Richard’s lifelong friend, “golden boy” Hugh Bowman, and Hugh’s beautiful, emotionally distant wife Helen. We know the eventual outcome of their summers spent together at (Australia’s) Palm Beach long before the full explanations spelled out at the conclusion—because Richard circles compulsively around various times in their shared and separate pasts, ruefully conceding the sexual indifference and moral weakness that allowed (perhaps encouraged) his wife and his best friend to betray their spouses. Knox has a gift for precise verbal discriminations and aphoristic statement (e.g., “ . . . secrecy can be as precious to some people as the air they breathe”), and Summerland’s many exquisite moments are often absorbing. But the best of such moments are lifted (adapted, if one wants to be generous) from Ford or Fitzgerald (there’s even a golf match during which a woman player cheats, as in The Great Gatsby), and the open acknowledgements the text makes to its sources do little to ameliorate the reader’s impression that he has encountered most of this previously. A pity, too, because both Pup and Helen are intensely imagined and credibly complex characters, deserving of a novel of their own.
A debut made up much less of observed and felt life than of absorbed fiction. Let’s see what Knox does when he writes his own book.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28094-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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