by Nancy Clark ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2005
Erudite evocations of time, people and place, all delivered in a dry and old-world voice, partly compensate for authorial...
Diamond-sharp social observation inspirits a literary romance.
Second-novelist Clark (The Hills at Home, 2003) resurrects characters from her debut: Alden and Becky Lowe and their daughter, Little Becky, who rechristens herself Julie during a plane journey to Prague. Czechoslovakia in 1992 is a “fledgling Republic” where Alden will work at the Ministry of Finances while Becky advises female entrepreneurs. Their temporary home is a grand pile, Castle Fortune, which, like their offices, is staffed by colorful Czechs whom the Americans consider children, while the Europeans view their visitors as innocents. All are the subject of Clark’s patrician wit, but especially the Czechs and later the Africans. Relations between Alden and Becky are cool, and she has kept secret her ardent letters from William Baskett who has loved her for “a lifetime.” During a party at the castle, Alden’s adoring secretary Franca learns about the correspondence and confronts Becky, precipitating the story’s single event. Becky drives away, across Europe, taking a ferry from Sicily to Africa, to join William at the Roman villa in Libya he has spent two years restoring. An idyll ensues. “No one had ever been truer or stronger or quieter in the service of hopeful passion” than William, who showers 20 years’ worth of accumulated, exquisite gifts on indulged Becky. A book found in a cupboard reveals the parallel history of the villa: around a.d. 70, it was the home of “a highborn Roman matron,” Polla Lucilla, who divorced one husband and married another, ruinously. In Prague, Julie and Alden struggle to accept Becky’s departure. The year turns, the country divides and Alden’s sister shows up, heralding his return to New York and Julie’s—now Juliet’s—removal from her Czech lover to an Irish convent school, perhaps in preparation for volume three of the trilogy.
Erudite evocations of time, people and place, all delivered in a dry and old-world voice, partly compensate for authorial excess and a vague narrative line.Pub Date: June 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42328-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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