A novel of voices—men's and women's, but mostly the voices of a couple having an illicit affair, he a married writer, she another man's wife. If at first Roth here sounds like Pinter, that's not accidental, for the book as well is about the English and discretion and artistic self-revelation. The snippets of talk are rather foamy, the blackouts somewhat too pat. The voices of others—speaking to Roth himself, not to fictional alter egos Zuckerman and Tarnopol—include East European women (and in one case, an aggrieved husband) and a biographer of Zuckerman who's already dealt with Zuckerman's own subject, Lonoff. All that's here, done in thin lines, is the scaffolding of Roth's previous house of fiction—and the dramatic crest of the book comes when we're finally let inside to see a commotion in the kitchen, the tablecloth being pulled out from under the dishes, so to speak: when a voice that is Roth's wife's accuses him of really having the affairs he orchestrates here, and when the writer must once again defend-himself-by-not-defending-himself: "I have been imagining myself, outside of my novel, having a love affair with a character inside my novel. . .look, I follow my leads where they take me—ah, the hell with it. What do you propose, that I police myself? That I don't follow through on this sort of impulse for fear—for fear of what? Enlightened prurient opinion? Well, not by you and not by anyone will I be censored like that!" With the added, more profound note: "I portray myself as implicated because it is not enough just to be present." More expository "presence" might have supercharged this (as it did in The Counterlife) origami-model Roth novel a little, though: you do have the feeling of being set up, of it being all indictment and no trial.
Pub Date: April 1, 1990
ISBN: 0679752943
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1990
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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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
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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