Goldstein expands on a story in her collection, Strange Attractors (1992), in this lively exploration of the ways chance intermingles with determinism in human lives. Sasha Saunders' beloved granddaughter is about to have a baby, and Sasha is so angry she could spit. But has Phoebe married outside her religion to deserve such derision? On the contrary: In the face of her grandmother's determined bohemianism, the delightful mathematics professor Phoebe (first seen in ``The Geometry of Soap Bubbles and Impossible Love'') has gone and married a stable Jewish computer wunderkind and settled happily into a sleepy New Jersey suburb, firmly believing that she can thus ensure a safe and happy future for her family. To explain how erroneous such a conviction can be, Sashaand the authormust go back several generations to the tiny Polish shtetl where Sasha was born, where nothing unexpected ever happened, and where Sasha's beloved sister, Fraydel, became so bored that she killed herself. Stunned, the family drifted to Warsaw, where Sasha found her calling in the chance- (or ``mazel-'') obsessed avant-garde theater. Had Fraydel not died, Sasha would never have discovered the stage, and if her grief hadn't forced her to seek comfort from Maurice, one of the theater's hangers-on, Sasha's daughter, Chloe, would never have been born. And had WW II not brought Chloe to New York, Chloe may have never conceived her own child with a professor she hardly knew, and Phoebe herself, with eyes so like Fraydel's, might never have existed. So how, her grandmother wonders, can Phoebe placidly await the birth of a son with all the confidence of her shtetl ancestors in life's predictability? Still, chance has given Phoebe a gift for finding happiness, so who's to say she's wrong? Goldstein (The Mind-Body Problem, 1983, etc.) draws heavily on the themes and rhythms of Yiddish folklore while offering her own sparkling wit and philosophical insight, as always, along the way.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-85648-7
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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