Strange bedfellows, but good company.
A vision of New York as a battleground, both literal and figurative, links three spirited stories from a master of sophisticated melodrama (Port Mungo, 2004, etc.).
“The Year of the Gibbet” is told from the perspective of a tormented man named Edmund. Writing his memoir in 1832, shortly before succumbing to cholera, he looks back to 1776, when the British fleet occupied New York harbor, Manhattan was under martial law and Washington’s demoralized army was encamped in New Jersey. Edmund’s account pays tribute to his gallant, fearless mother, a working-class revolutionary who traveled as a courier between Washington’s army and a sea captain plotting against the Brits, taking little Edmund with her. The boy’s confusion under interrogation led to his mother’s arrest, court martial and death by hanging; Edmund, haunted by his mother’s ghost, never forgives himself. McGrath paints with a broad brush here, but with sufficient intensity to keep readers turning the pages. The same is true of “Ground Zero,” his over-the-top but compelling final story. Here the battleground is a psychiatrist’s office. The therapist/narrator is fighting for the soul of her patient Danny, who has become ensnared by Asian-American prostitute Kim in the wake of 9/11. The evil of the terrorist assault is replicated in Kim’s evil sex games, previously inflicted on a lover who died during the attack. (She’s seen his ghost.) In “Julius,” the triptych’s middle piece, the domestic battle is joined when rich, 19th-century merchant Noah van Horn refuses to allow his only son Julius to marry a poor Irish artist’s model. Ruthless second-in-command Max Rinder, who sees the city “as a lawless territory where ferocity, speed and cunning counted most,” arranges the Irish girl’s disappearance. Julius has a breakdown and is institutionalized. McGrath’s range makes this dense, twisty tale the book’s most involving.
Strange bedfellows, but good company.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-312-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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