Leroy’s delicate psychological insight falls to pieces under the weight of solving a preposterous murder mystery.
Leroy (The River House, 2005, etc.), who specializes in delineating the lives of unhappy, not entirely likable British women, describes a young single mother whose child-rearing problems defy mere psychology.
Thanks to an affair with a married man several years earlier, narrator Grace is now raising preschooler Sylvie on her own. A beautiful child, Sylvie has a number of quirks. She has always called Grace by her first name. She is intensely afraid of water. Lately she has been upsetting her best friend Lennie by saying the little girl isn’t the real Lennie. She sleeps with a photograph of an Irish coastal town she claims is her real home. Her obstinacy and fears increase, causing uncontrollable tantrums and moments of rage. Soon her preschool expels Sylvie. Lennie’s mother Karen, Grace’s only friend, suggests that Sylvie needs a therapist. Instead Grace seeks out Adam Winters, an academic researcher of the paranormal. Until Adam’s arrival, the novel is an ambitiously queasy character study of Grace: protective of her child but also defensive, still obsessed with her ex-lover and envious of Karen’s more comfortable, settled life. Adam introduces parapsychology as an improved alternative to bland mainstream solutions. Grace’s early distrust of Adam quickly gives way, in part because she finds him attractive but also because she is moved when he describes his older brother’s death while they were stealing a car together as teens and his brother’s ghostly return. The possibility that telling such a story to a client may be inappropriate does not enter into this novel’s Gothic worldview any more than the questionable ethics of Adam and Grace’s growing romantic involvement. Grace, Sylvie and Adam head to the Irish village depicted in Sylvie’s photo and ferret out her former life. Seven years ago, nine-year-old Jessica (now Sylvie) and her mother were murdered. The murderer is still at large, though not for long.
Leroy’s delicate psychological insight falls to pieces under the weight of solving a preposterous murder mystery.Pub Date: April 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-12601-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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