Elegant prose, thought-provoking plot, mammoth themes—and sometimes slow-going.
An overly intense, multilayered tale about three characters facing a life-and-death situation, a state of affairs brought into being by religion, class, social consciousness, and political activism.
Once again, Gordon, astute observer of Catholicism and the inner lives of women in both fiction and nonfiction (Spending, 1998; Joan of Arc, 2000, etc.), continues her quest for meaning. Here, on Christmas night 1998, Maria Meyers receives a call that her 20-year old daughter, Pearl, who is studying Irish at Trinity College, has chained herself to the flagpole outside the American embassy and is near death from self-starvation. As a distraught, uncomprehending Maria flies to Ireland and her beloved only child, an omniscient narrator begins the chronicle, framed by 20th-century history, of Maria, Joseph, and Pearl, a trio strongly evoking the Holy Family. Maria is a child of the ’60s. She rebelled against the privileged, repressive Catholic childhood provided for her by her wealthy, conservative father, and had an affair with a refugee from Pol Pot’s Cambodia, a doctor who returned to his homeland and certain death, never knowing he had fathered a child. We’re then made privy to Pearl’s story, the most interesting and freshest of the three, her Dublin experiences with the “new IRA” and, before that, her growing up as the shy daughter of the strong-willed Maria and a surrogate father, Joseph Kasperman. Joseph was Maria’s childhood friend, the housekeeper’s son whom Maria’s father educated and to whom he willed his successful business in religious kitsch. Through the narrator, we learn about Joseph’s sacrifice of an academic career to satisfy his obligation to Maria’s father, and his obsession with doing the right thing. The three converge in Dublin. As Pearl, hospitalized, clings to life, they’re forced to face the present and the past, and the question of what’s worth the price of staying alive.
Elegant prose, thought-provoking plot, mammoth themes—and sometimes slow-going.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42315-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
