A portrait of 1970s New York that’s sturdy if sometimes stiff.
A teenager gets wise to Manhattan, and his father, via the city’s architectural ornaments.
Griffin, the narrator of Gill’s debut novel, recalls the year he was 13 years old and navigating the ruins of his parents’ broken marriage. His mother is taking in boarders at their home on 89th Street between Third and Lex to make ends meet, while his father works in antiques restoration. When dad notices Griffin’s ability to squeeze into small spaces, he’s recruited into the dark side of the family business, sneaking into the city’s historic buildings and chipping and sawing off gargoyles and other decorations from facades. The book is set during 1974 and 1975, with the crime-ridden city at the brink of bankruptcy, so the pair’s lawlessness feels like part of the landscape, though Dad insists he’s “liberating” civic treasures from the inevitable wrecking ball. (The novel’s poignant prologue is set in the New Jersey dumping grounds of the ruins of old Penn Station.) Gill, who’s written often on New York’s architectural history, understands buildings from wrought-iron panels to terra cotta sculptures, which makes for some detailed and engaging set pieces, like the pair’s death-defying, dark-of-night effort to remove a gargoyle from the top of the Woolworth Building or Griffin’s exploring the innards of the Statue of Liberty with a romantic interest. But as Griffin looks back on his youth from the present day, his (and Gill’s) nostalgia feels awkwardly stronger for buildings than for loved ones. Dad is purposefully Sphinx-like, but Griffin’s mother, sister, and friends rarely feel like more than incidental figures relative to the novel’s true passion. Even so, the story enlivens in the closing chapters, which set the depths of Dad’s obsession against the arrival of a hurricane, suggesting that our best efforts to save our civic treasures will always have to reckon with nature taking its course.
A portrait of 1970s New York that’s sturdy if sometimes stiff.Pub Date: March 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-94688-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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
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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