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SWEET & LOW

Work that bears the promise of good things to come.

A first collection of short stories by newcomer White (How to Survive a Summer, 2017).

“How well can you know a person?” That question, posed by a therapist, provides a mantra for White’s stories, set in Mississippi and, within its confines, the South of people who are “educated and practical, mostly Southerners with quasi liberal leanings,” to say nothing of a former Miss Mississippi who “came out as a lesbian years after her reign.” The opening story, “The Lovers,” recounts a different kind of love story, a bisexual triangle that operates in all its awkward effort at casualness until the apex “got himself killed in a plane crash, and shit got complicated.” As with much literary fiction, the scenario pushes at the edges of probability but seems plausible—especially in the possibility that that educated, practical, liberal cohort, forming the audience for the ostensibly wronged wife’s podcast, consists of all the dead man’s former lovers, which “would make her, like, the ultimate fag hag.” White verges on fable with the next story, in which a man already in a very bad situation faces down the karma that just might be visited on him by a passing cottonmouth: “It braved to skim across his neck, and Pete could sense each of its tiny ribs as it treaded across his skin, rubbing his flesh like sandpaper.” A highlight is the title story, a fine exemplar of lower-class yearning, in this case to make a fortune as a country music star guided by a slick Svengali: “They’re all so whiney,” says the would-be star of the models he’s guided her to, to which he replies, “Whiney sells.” There’s little whining here, but all the adultery and unrequited longing and even a dead dog needed for a country hit are present. A bonus: White’s unapologetic homage to William Faulkner, known here as “the Author,” turned into an industry by the little town that once shunned him as a boozy menace.

Work that bears the promise of good things to come.

Pub Date: June 5, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-399-57365-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Blue Rider Press

Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018

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CONCLAVE

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

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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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