An intricate feminist/New Age fantasy, set in the near future, throws an ordinary young woman into the center of a mythic drama: she is to be a postmodern Mary, immaculately conceiving a feminine savior who'll restore the spirit of a revolution gone sour. Jennifer Mazdan, preoccupied with her divorce, doesn't care much about Teller's Day in Poughkeepsie—Tellers are something like shamans, celebrity storytellers with the power to transport their listeners inside the very essence of the myths, or ``Pictures,'' they tell. Magical spiritual rites and sacrifices govern every detail of life in Jennifer's world, but the elite Tellers, who represent and interpret the will of the Founders (the mostly feminine gang of heroines who've sparked a great spiritual revolution) have become corrupt and empty of real spirit. Everywhere religion has become rote. Now, Jennifer is compelled to hear a certain Teller only because of the awful nagging pressure of the neighbors in her ``hive''—a sort of mystical Levittown. Inexplicably dropping into a deep sleep on the way, however, she has a strange dream that somehow impregnates her. Although she tries to ignore her growing pregnancy, she gets more and more evidence that she's been picked by a supreme ``Agency'' to bear a child who will return her empty world to the days of great feminist spiritual heroines. As Jennifer tracks her husband through the streets of Manhattan, more auspicious events take place—an ice- cream vendor, for instance, tells her: ``there are only two things in the world. Suffering and ecstasy. Do you understand?'' Finally, exiled to an ugly apartment and attended by three midwives and the holy ice-cream man, Jennifer gives birth to the little girl who will bring down the empty Tellers. Widely imaginative and entertaining, but with a thousand loose threads. Despite the beguiling, often witty details, Pollack (The New Tarot—not reviewed) overloads the book.
Pub Date: May 29, 1992
ISBN: 0-87951-447-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
IN THE NEWS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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