by Peter Rock ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 2005
Elegantly paranoid but incomplete.
Preteen wasteland meets adult psychosis under rain-swept skies.
The kids aren’t all right in the city of Portland, Oregon, where Leon, Chris, and Kayla—friends from being in a gifted program and, at 15, a tight trio—skateboard through the streets, imagining their classical-music-playing, non-puerile selves more advanced than the teenage hoard. A mission to direct their overabundant energies comes in the form of Natalie, a truly odd woman who hires them to strip copper wire out of power lines so she can sell it. The kids get a cut, of course. They don’t really know what to make of Natalie, who lives in a trailer filled with buzzing fluorescent lights, pores over her collection of issues of Playboy from 1976 (her interest comes from some long-buried association with optimism, power, and sexuality), and has a thing about electricity. Such is the current that runs through these loosely plotted pages, especially after Leon gets badly electrocuted on a wire-stripping mission and starts acting strangely. When another adult enters the picture—Steven, who once worked with Natalie—some of her past becomes clearer, at least to the point where we know she was once a professional of some sort who then disappeared, possibly after an electrocution. As Leon’s behavior turns ever more erratic and the darker elements of Natalie’s plans start to be known, the kids’ already antisocial tendencies ratchet up a notch, buoyed by Kayla’s reading of Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea. Rock’s latest outing (after This Is the Place, 1997)—its title is the kids’ name for their clique—is rather hermetic, shut off from the machinations of the workaday world, much like its neurotic little clutch of characters. The story goes nowhere near where you might imagine; plot connections are left dangling; mysterious and unexplained characters drift off into the night. Yet there’s a cool dread about its pages that captivates for long stretches.
Elegantly paranoid but incomplete.Pub Date: April 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-59692-112-9
Page Count: 300
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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 John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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