The Final Judgment: overly proselytizing.
More pop-religious pap from Bowen (Holy Ghost Corner, 2006, etc.).
When her pretentious husband of 16 years kicked Yvonne Fountain Copeland and her two daughters out of their Richmond, Va., home, she became determined to make a better life for herself. Now, after moving to North Carolina, she has a faculty job in the Department of Design at Evangeline T. Marshall University, “or Eva T., as the school was called by most black folk in Durham County.” Yvonne soon crosses paths with Curtis, the insanely handsome and popular head basketball coach. Instantly attracted, she hesitates because he has yet to be saved by the Lord. For his part, as the basketball season goes downhill and his job is threatened, Curtis struggles over whether or not to give himself to God and wonders if it’s worth quitting his playboy ways for Yvonne. Scheming members of the Eva T. administration and a rival college’s coaching staff propel what little story line there is, with Curtis and Yvonne’s burgeoning love adding some slight forward movement, but plot is mostly supplanted by religious fervor. Yvonne carries anointing oil in her purse; an entire chapter is devoted to watching “Apostle Grady Grey’s Half an Hour of Holy Ghost Power” on DVD; and emotions run borderline hysterical as various people decide to turn their lives over to Jesus. Mind you, plenty of characters go astray as well. The narrative reads like a sermon, complete with jeremiads against strip joints and licentious preachers. Indeed, the preachy prose has a spicy subtext; sexual undertones, flirtation and women’s figures—particularly their backsides—get plenty of time on the page. Bowen commits the mortal literary sin of making any interesting characters or plot take a backseat to the obvious star of the show, God
The Final Judgment: overly proselytizing.Pub Date: April 14, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-57775-5
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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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