MALAISE

Name: MALAISE
Author: Nancy Lemann
ISBN: 0-7432-1548-6

by Nancy Lemann ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2002

A seductive read—the literary equivalent of a hammock, a warm breeze, and a tumbler of whiskey—certain to breed in readers a...

bookshelf

A sumptuously lazy fourth novel from Lemann (The Fiery Pantheon, 1998, etc.), this about a transplanted southerner adjusting to life in California.

Narrator Fleming Ford has a lot to say about not much in particular, and God bless her for saying it. A journalist and mother from Alabama, she’s married to engineer Mac, who’s brought the family to Esperenza, California, on the desert near the Mexican border, while he works on a water project. Fleming is trying to keep her career with a New York newspaper going, but she’s having a hard time coming up with stories, a problem not helped by her department’s name of “New Perspectives.” She’s also falling in love with Mr. Lieberman, the English media tycoon and owner of the paper, whom she runs into on the street in New York. Slim, elegant, just dripping with Old World panache, he satisfies her need for a particular type of decadence plus offering link to her southern past (Lieberman’s recently deceased wife hailed from Alabama as well). Meanwhile, Esperenza is driving Fleming to the brink: the never-changing weather, omnipresent mariachi bands, and beautiful houses cut from the desert five minutes prior to your moving in—it all breeds in her a desperate yearning for history, seediness, age. That her infatuation with Lieberman is pretty harmless is clear from the start, at least to the reader if not to the obsessing Fleming, who’s worried about her marriage, even if nobody else is: “All men are dangerous until you get married. But of course after that they are lethal.” Little plot-ground gets covered by the end, but that’s all right. There’s no need for plot if atmosphere, attitude, and plenty of good talk can carry you along.

A seductive read—the literary equivalent of a hammock, a warm breeze, and a tumbler of whiskey—certain to breed in readers a desire for decadent ennui and slow ruin.

Pub Date: June 11, 2002

ISBN: 0-7432-1548-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FIERY PANTHEON
by Nancy Lemann

- BOOK REVIEW
SPORTSMAN'S PARADISE
by Nancy Lemann

bookshelf

WITHOUT FAIL

From the Jack Reacher series , Vol. 6

by Lee Child ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...

bookshelf

When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.

Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-399-14861-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SECRET
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

- BOOK REVIEW
NO PLAN B
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

- BOOK REVIEW
BETTER OFF DEAD
by Lee Child & Andrew Child

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

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.