Zuravleff’s love for ancient treasures and their sometimes fallible guardians is clear on every page. Unfortunately, that...
A glacially slow second novel from Zuravleff (The Frequency of Souls, 1996) concerns an embattled museum and its varied staff.
The Museum of Asian Art, with its fabulous location on the Mall in Washington, D.C., has a fateful day in 1999 when its banners promoting Asian cultures send the nation’s governors into a xenophobic tizzy that causes them to pressure the trustees into converting the museum into a food court. The museum’s director, beloved and energetic Joseph Lattimore, surprisingly caves (add unconvincing characterization to a dumb premise). He gives notice and leaves with wife Emmy for a dig in the Taklamakan, a Central Asian desert, where he will be taken hostage by Kashmiri terrorists, barely escaping with his life. Conflict in the desert substitutes for conflict in D.C., where the battle is never joined between trustees and museum staff. Acting director Promise Whittaker doesn’t learn of the trustees’ plans until the story’s halfway point, and doesn’t save the day by enlisting the Dalai Lama’s help until the end (something Joseph could have done at the beginning). Petite, goodhearted Promise is the actual protagonist. This 43-year-old Oklahoman, married with two kids to top Amnesty staffer Leo, finds she is pregnant again. Zuravleff, a former editor of books for the Smithsonian, eulogizes this working mom at length when she’s not imparting information on Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet who’s Promise’s specialty. As for the titular bowl, curator Arthur Franklin has acquired this fine Chinese porcelain for the museum but drops it at the donation ceremony, shattering it beyond repair. The broken bowl embodies a Buddhist lesson, but it’s also a victim of bedroom shenanigans, for Arthur’s triumphal lofting of the bowl had been suggested by fellow curator Talbot during some gay foreplay. Not to worry. Arthur gets off with probation, as does Min Chen, a curator who once embezzled museum funds to pay for fertility treatments.
Zuravleff’s love for ancient treasures and their sometimes fallible guardians is clear on every page. Unfortunately, that love alone isn’t sufficient foundation for a novel.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-11571-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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