Not wholly successful but, nonetheless, an ambitious, striking debut.
Offering both poetic and standard fare at turns, theologian Engel’s first novel combines the story of Lot’s wife with a contemporary narrative of a woman’s search for personal absolution.
The story begins as Ruth, an academic, 40, and pregnant, is summoned to her dying mother’s bed, a journey she’s not sure she wants to make. Raised in a strict Dutch Calvinist community, Ruth has spent the better part of her life seeking the approval of this fanatical, dominating mother, and, in turn, rebelling against her. Throughout, her decisions have been governed by the search for a knowable God. Her attempts, whether made by swimming long distances underwater as a child, taking mescaline in college, or living at a Swiss religious retreat, do little to shore the rift between body and soul, making Ruth bitter and, now, afraid of the child she is about to bear. Hearkening to the tale of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the fateful backward glance from the wife of Lot, the story offers Midrashic interpretation (“narrative exploration of the meaning hidden in the silences of the text”) as Ruth is led to question the multiplicity of reasons that caused Lot’s wife to look behind. The Midrashim—sometimes fanciful turnings on the Lot story, sometimes explanations of historic readings—are always of interest, though early on they may seem to have no relation to Ruth’s life. And, indeed, Ruth’s stories sometimes falter (while her childhood and young adulthood are relayed in sharp detail, the next 20 years are covered by sporadic instances meant to stand for all the missing years between), requiring a double interpretation both for Ruth and the wife of Lot. Still, by novel’s end, the narrative threads merge harmoniously, leaving an impression of hope and grace.
Not wholly successful but, nonetheless, an ambitious, striking debut.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2001
ISBN: 1-58243-156-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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