Kempadoo charms and entices, but his intriguing narrative is not fully sustained.
An impulsive and inchoate sexual ménage embodies the incompatibility of contrasting classes—in a relentlessly lush second novel from the Guyanese-British author (Buxton Spice, 1999).
On the Caribbean island of Tobago, 20-year-old Cliff Dunstan and his ebullient younger brother Ossi (a genial sex machine) drift between occasional employment and indolence, to the intermittent dismay of their forthright “Mudda” and disapproving sister Lynette (the unmarried mother of a two-year-old). The brothers fall into acquaintance with wealthy corporate attorney Peter Johnson and his smoldering biracial wife Bella, who invite the “boys” to their lavish home, wining and dining and seducing them, settling on the nubile (though sexually experienced) Cliff as a kind of erotic toy. An allegory of exploitation is suggested by numerous references to the wide social and economic gaps between the Johnsons and their plaything, perhaps best encapsulated in the tart remarks of the couple’s visiting Trinidadian friend SC (initials denote a rude sexual cognomen), who warns them against indigent blacks and pointedly confronts the frazzled Cliff (“How come you all reach so far, man?”). The bitter dénouement (the Johnsons’ money, then their car turn up missing, and suspicion inevitably falls on Cliff) is deadened by redundant courtroom scenes in which its already loose plot slackens even further. But the tale is energized by Kempadoo’s lovely language—especially in chapters from Cliff’s viewpoint—in a lilting patois filled with arresting usages (“gallery,” “jealous,” and “advantage” as verbs, and onomatopoetic action words like “slurk” and “squinny”) and hauntingly vivid word pictures (“Bright-color pirogues all ’round the jetty tippling like floating insects, bowed bamboo fishing poles like whiskers dipping”). Such moments (and there are many) create an aching impression of a languorous paradise unthinkingly appropriated and violated.
Kempadoo charms and entices, but his intriguing narrative is not fully sustained.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-27757-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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