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BARNEY'S VERSION

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

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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OF MICE AND MEN

Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.

This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define.  Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936

ISBN: 0140177396

Page Count: 83

Publisher: Covici, Friede

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936

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