A lively complement to Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, and other...
Canadian academic and novelist Boyagoda (Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square, 2015, etc.) skewers the corporatized university and modern-world politics alike in this delicious satire.
Princely St. John Umbiligoda teaches English at a college once called Holy Family College until the faculty “expressed concern that the school was becoming increasingly irrelevant and too Catholic-seeming,” whereupon it became the University of the Family Universal, or UFU. (Say the initials aloud.) That didn’t help the fiscal situation, and the school is now teetering on bankruptcy. That’s just the beginning of Prin’s troubles. He’s not particularly happily married, he’s not well-paid, his work as a specialist in “marine life in the Canadian literary landscape” isn’t setting the world on fire, and though only 40 he’s battling prostate cancer. When a Chinese developer called The Nephew comes along with a plan to bail out the school, it’s to make himself a fortune by leveraging the resources of a faraway Middle Eastern nation called Dragomans: UFU will become a retirement home for the well-to-do, and its Dragomans branch will train students to become caretakers with “diplomas…in Eldercare Studies,” as Prin’s girlfriend, who’s in on the deal, reveals, with the students then coming to Toronto “for internships at the condominium The Nephew is going to build on your campus." Teaching The English Patient far from home has its attractions, and so does that erstwhile girlfriend, but politics complicates the picture—politics academic and worldly, and economics, and sex, and culture clashes, and good old-fashioned terrorism. Boyagoda’s novel careens to an untidy, violent end with plenty of unresolved questions, which makes it a good thing that it’s supposed to be the first installment of a trilogy. Messy though it may be, it’s a lot of fun—and you can’t help but read on when opening a book that begins, “Eight months before he became a suicide bomber, Prin went to the zoo with his family.”
A lively complement to Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, and other academic sendups.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-77196-245-2
Page Count: 299
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
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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SEEN & HEARD
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