Where so much experimental fiction seems pessimistic or even cynical about its possibilities, this novel sustains a spirit...
An open-ended, postmodern fable that somehow delivers the satisfaction of the novelistic conventions it subverts.
For a narrative that defies the usual notions of plausibility, cause and effect, beginning and end—and leaves readers wondering what the title might have to do with the plot until the conclusion (or lack thereof)—the latest from La Farge (The Artist of the Missing, 1999, etc.) is a page-turning pleasure. Here is what the novel is “about”: The narrator is a San Francisco computer programmer in his 30s, who refers to twin sisters (named Marie Celeste and Celeste Marie) as his mothers, who never knew his late father but must reconcile conflicting stories about him, and who travels to upstate New York following the death of his grandfather to sort through the estate. While there, he becomes reunited with a Turkish brother and sister whose neighboring ski lodge sparked a family feud, and he resumes his infatuation with the sister. He describes her as like “a fictional character or really like several fictional characters, none of whom could know anything about the others.” Before embracing the future of computers, the narrator was a graduate student in history, specializing in an apocalyptic sect from the mid 19th century, leaving Stanford without finishing his doctoral dissertation because he’d lost faith in history’s meaning or purpose. As one of his mothers tells him, “It was the kind of story you wouldn’t understand until it was finished, which was, she said, true of all stories.” Yet by the time readers reach the point where the narrator is composing this narrative—a past that is very much present—the book has achieved a momentum that extends beyond its conclusion (and continues at luminousairplanes.com, which refers to the text as a “hyperromance”).
Where so much experimental fiction seems pessimistic or even cynical about its possibilities, this novel sustains a spirit of innocence and wonder.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-19431-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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