The detail devoted to the erotic role-playing of Devesh and Josie make it difficult to view them as fully rounded characters...
A woman’s sadomasochistic tendencies are traceable to childhood trauma in Abrams’s titillating debut.
Josie is a graduate student studying anthropology. Mary, whose cool, competent air reminds her of her distant mother, hires Josie as a live-in nanny for Tyler, six, and toddler Maddie. Josie is particularly drawn to Tyler—they share a quasi-autistic fascination with counting and tabulating. When Josie encounters Devesh, a surgeon from India, she senses that Devesh is the man she has been hungering for—a dominant male who will help her realize her darkest masochistic sexual fantasies. Soon she’s spending hours at Devesh’s pad being “disciplined”—bound with leather cuffs and whipped with a variety of implements; or “punished” —beaten with less finesse and no concern for her gratification. She’s not bothered by the bruising consequences of acting out her obsession, nor does she care to plumb the psychological truth behind her predilection. It’s only when she entertains fantasies of spanking Tyler and Maddie and comes within hairbrush length of paddling Tyler that she starts to think she may have a problem. Her need for self-analysis is accelerated by her mother’s sudden death. Called to California for the funeral, she’s forced to confront grim realities: Her mother stopped loving her after her infant brother’s crib death when Josie was four, and now it’s too late to rectify or rehabilitate their relationship. She feels unworthy of her father’s love because, as a repressed memory will reveal, she was complicit in the death that eviscerated her family’s happiness. This complicity apparently underlies her perversion of choice. Once she gains this insight and confesses to her father, it’s unclear—and some readers may be disappointed by this facile outcome—whether she’s going to alter her behavior or continue to indulge in it, shame-free.
The detail devoted to the erotic role-playing of Devesh and Josie make it difficult to view them as fully rounded characters or to much care whether they can reform their love along less deviant lines.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-7047-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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
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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