From a promising young Canadian writer, a failed effort that says everything quite well but may not interest many.
A college girl’s romance with an older artist turns into a serious relationship and then a mystery—after he disappears without a trace.
Impressionable young Jolene Iolas is 19 and attending Bard College. While her friend and roommate Molly is sleeping her way through most of the school’s male population, Jolene has more serious things on her mind (though indeed she’s no wallflower). She strikes up a correspondence with the artist Martin Sloane, whose work has enraptured her, and arranges for him to come to campus and exhibit his work. Martin’s art consists of gnomic little boxes packed full of odd objects suggesting sadness, memory, and loss (descriptions of these Joseph Cornell–esque boxes precede each chapter). Jolene and Martin begin spending weekends together, and pretty soon it’s years later, Jolene is teaching at Indiana University, and Martin is commuting from Toronto as often as he can. A visit from Molly scrapes a few raw nerves in the fragile relationship, and Jolene wakes up afterward to find Martin gone. Many years later, Jolene reconnects with Molly—whom she had a confusing fight with after Martin’s disappearance—when the two meet up in Dublin, Martin’s birthplace, sniffing out the scent of the elusive box-maker and making halfhearted stabs at fixing their broken friendship. Jolene narrates the bulk of the story, though intermittent chapters come from Martin. The whole, albeit impressively written, ultimately doesn’t sustain itself, and when, a third of the way in, Martin disappears, the novel has a difficult time recovering. The events driving Martin to leave, murky as they are, seem wrenchingly contrived, and the mystery that follows isn’t especially engrossing.
From a promising young Canadian writer, a failed effort that says everything quite well but may not interest many.Pub Date: June 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-73936-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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
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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