by Pat Barker ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 8, 2016
Lacks the epic sweep of her Booker Prize–winning Regeneration trilogy but nonetheless, a strong example of this gifted...
After a midtrilogy slump with Toby’s Room (2012), Barker returns to form in the rueful, cautiously hopeful conclusion to a story that began in pre–World War I London and concludes with its three protagonists enduring the Blitz.
Ambitious young students when their complex bonds were forged at the Slade School of Fine Art in Life Class (2008), Elinor Brooke, Kit Neville, and Paul Tarrant are now middle-aged painters contending with ingrained sexism (Elinor), a declining reputation (Neville), and the knowledge that his best-known, if not necessarily his best, work is behind him (Paul). World War I brought disfiguring injuries to Kit and drew together Elinor and Paul as lovers; now all three are on the homefront, dealing with the carnage produced by German planes’ near-nightly bombings. Barker searingly re-creates a wartime landscape in which the apocalyptic has become routine: people stoically huddle overnight in Tube stations and barely notice the rubble they walk past on the daytime streets; rescue workers hunt for survivors inside devastated buildings that may collapse at any moment. But this is not a rah-rah Britain’s Greatest Generation novel; Barker unsentimentally depicts Kit maneuvering for advantage as Paul and Elinor’s marriage falters. Her mother’s death stirs unwelcome memories of Elinor’s charged relationship with her brother Toby; Paul, unsettled by thoughts of his own long-dead, mentally ill mother, falls into bed with a fellow air-raid warden. “Why do men think that makes it better?” Elinor snorts when he offers the time-honored excuse that the affair wasn’t important. “It makes it worse.” Is her one-night stand with Kit payback or a long overdue reckoning with their past? It might be both; Barker is as subtle and tough-minded here about human nature as in all her work. Yet the closing pages suggest the possibility of new beginnings even as they acknowledge the permanence of old wounds.
Lacks the epic sweep of her Booker Prize–winning Regeneration trilogy but nonetheless, a strong example of this gifted British writer’s intelligent, uncompromising way with fiction.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-53772-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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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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