An engaging tale with an earnest hero but a permeating melancholy leaves a lingering sense of disquietude.
In this novel by an author acclaimed for his Midwestern-themed short stories, a young man struggles to find his path to a meaningful future.
Readers meet 27-year-old Tom Johnson as he sits in a pub waiting for his classmates to return from a first-semester law final; he has arrived early because he walked out of the exam without completing it. This is not the first thing he hasn’t finished. There was a stint as a member of a band, Self Portrait, down in Buenos Aires, but it never attained the envisioned success: “On paper, our music was revolutionary. The theory was better than the sound; it was better appreciated with the brain than with the ear.” He returned to his hometown, Duluth, Minnesota. Next came Seminary School in Chicago and marriage. Both endeavors ended quickly. Now, at the tail end of his 20s, he has just quit law school and has no idea what will come next. Back at his parents’ house, he stoically faces their disappointment, accepting their implicit judgment that he is a failure. But his father has arranged for him to work as an intern in his own law firm during winter break, and Tom follows through, finding he enjoys much of the work. Nobody is told he is no longer a student. Then he meets Linda Brekke, a captivating young woman, just days before tragedy befalls her family. The trajectory of his life is about to change. Tom is the first-person narrator, and he gives barely a hint early on that he is looking back from several decades in the future. The bulk of the action takes place in the early 1990s. One of Kilgore’s (Losing Camille, 2010) talents is to place readers in the moment, even if the narrative jumps back and forth through the first 30-odd years of Tom’s life. Each vignette reveals an experienced, meticulous writer of short stories, encapsulating the essence of that individual brief time, although the leaps forward are sometimes abrupt and disorienting. The book’s opening line sets the stage for what will follow: “Life is lived entirely between the ears.” The considerable mental meandering on the nature of the universe and almost anything else that interests Tom— containing more than a little childhood and young adulthood angst—does become wearisome. Here, for example, he ponders musical concepts: “What did it mean to say the treble clef was ‘higher’ than the bass clef? What had height to do with it?...Why do people say I just played an ascending line? Why can’t it just as well be said to be descending?” Yet the reader wants good things for this insecure and grave protagonist who can’t seem to fit comfortably into any identity. When he does finally settle down, it is more the result of fortuitous happenstance than of passion. The final chapters lack the earlier enthusiasm even as Tom finds contentment.
An engaging tale with an earnest hero but a permeating melancholy leaves a lingering sense of disquietude.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63505-559-7
Page Count: 265
Publisher: MCP Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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