Not as profound as it aspires to be, but great fun for those who like to match wits against a tricky author practicing some...
Sex and physics turn out to have a lot in common in the latest from Goldstein (Mazel, 1995, etc.), who depicts the tortured passions of three scientists trying to restore meaning to a relativistic universe.
Many years ago, Samuel Mallach published a paper that defied the reigning orthodoxy of quantum mechanics by asserting that objective reality existed and could be measured. This affront to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle earned him decades of invisibility; when narrator Justin Childs discovers Mallach’s work—which taps into his own distaste for “unraveling the rationality of the world” through physics—the older man is a bitter ghost relegated to teaching an elementary undergraduate course at the fancy university at which Justin has just arrived as a rising faculty star. Justin wants to work with Mallach on new equations that will vindicate this heresy; he’s even more enthusiastic when, after his first dinner at their home, Mallach’s gorgeous daughter, Dana, takes him to her room for a night of bliss. The sex is as high-falutin’ as the science; Dana’s mother, Carlotta, was a student of Tantric erotic disciplines, and Mallach believes his dead wife’s expertise is what fueled his innovations in physics. We know from Justin’s opening sentence (“The essential fact is that I hate her”) that some catastrophe has destroyed his collaboration with Mallach père and fille, but the arrogant, aggressively intellectual tone of his narration makes it hard to feel much apprehension for the clearly doomed characters. Goldstein has always been a rather chilly writer, and it takes a while for the story to develop enough momentum to overcome this emotional distance. Gradually, however, you’re pulled in by the odd anomalies in a narrative that seems to be shifting between Justin’s first-person chronicle and a more omniscient account. Goldstein ties together all the seemingly loose ends with a fabulous final plot twist far more satisfying than her sententious summing-up: “We are things that would know and we are things that would love, and oh how fused is that entanglement.”
Not as profound as it aspires to be, but great fun for those who like to match wits against a tricky author practicing some masterful sleight-of-hand.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2000
ISBN: 0-395-98659-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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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