A fair-enough stab at Rothian (or, perhaps more accurately, Bellovian) comic portraiture intermittently enlivens this overlong story of an aging TV producer, lover of women, and possible murderer: the eponymous Barney Panofsky, a kind of lower-case Mickey Sabbath or Augie March. A lifelong Montrealer (and devoted fan of hockey's Les Canadiens), Barney is penning his own story as he's about to be ``outed'' for his various disgusting personal traits and disgraceful (when not outright criminal) behavior—the outing to be done by his former friend, successful popular novelist Terry McIver. ``I have my principles,'' Barney protests. ``I have never handled arms, drugs, or health foods.'' What he has handled are three long-suffering (and, to differing degrees, insufferable) wives: the high-strung Clara, a poet and suicide, who becomes a feminist saint; the unforgiving shrew whom Barney refers to only as ``the Second Mrs. Panofsky''; and, best of all, the gentle and charming Miriam (whom—let's be fair about this—Barney met and fell for during his second wedding ceremony). Aside from marriage, his life is pretty much taken up by the demands of his company, Totally Useless Productions, which churns out highly popular and instantly forgettable mass entertainment (``Had I suspected I would survive to . . . sixty-seven,'' Barney muses, ``I would prefer to have earned a reputation as a gentleman, rather than a ruffian who made his fortune producing crap for tv''). We hardly believe him, but that also hardly matters, in a fast-paced, foulmouthed, generally entertaining romp that unfortunately grows tiresome whenever Richler lets Barney drone on about his literary loves or pet hates (feminists, antismoking activists, the annoyingly middlebrow Terry McIver, and QuÇbeáois separatists, among many other targets) or alludes coyly to characters from his own earlier novels. The result pales beside such Richler triumphs as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1960) and St. Urbain's Horseman (1971), but it's a pretty decent comic novel nevertheless.
Pub Date: Dec. 18, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-40418-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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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