Good eats for readers with a taste for gall and wormwood.
This novel seems calculated to cure the reader of any optimism he may have, to smash his rose-colored glasses.
The son of Russian immigrants, Ithiel Ingbar is on his own at 15, working brutal jobs and defending himself in Chicago, where it “was beat or be beaten, eat or be eaten, the usual animal kingdom stuff.” But Ingbar’s talent for drawing is his saving grace, and since it’s his only hope of escape from this hell, he tenaciously holds onto it. Friends help him get a security job at an art museum, a job that comes with free art classes. But every time hope beckons, it’s dashed. Booted from the museum, he joins the Army for the GI Bill benefits, but he’s treated like an outsider, nearly dies of spinal meningitis and eventually goes AWOL. But he keeps going, two steps forward, one step back. After making another hopeful start as an artist in Boston, he’s framed for the murder of a runaway girl. Ironically, the Army, having first dibs on him, rescues him from the Boston judicial system. Years later, in the bleak present day—recession, endless wars, the 1 percent versus the 99 percent, rampant unemployment and the rest of it—Ithiel is back in Chicago, breaking even as a working artist. He has a good woman, and marrying her and starting a family seems almost possible. But does Ithiel really have a chance in this rigged world? The rage-filled, often angry narrative can seem like a bad dream. When not focused on Ingbar being thwarted yet again, it shows a broader picture of how stupidity and greed have made a shambles of society and the economy. Sexton (Desert Flower, 2009), who’s also a poet and artist, has an ear and an eye for detail, and the impressionistic descriptions help illuminate the narrative. Early on, readers may notice a somewhat distracting habit of rhyming: “Girls who had given him the eye now turned away when he passed by,” and “yet fever bright from the incandescent light.” Nonetheless, Sexton proves to be an impressive wordsmith who delights in roiling madness.
Good eats for readers with a taste for gall and wormwood.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479119677
Page Count: 180
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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