Disappointing; the 9/11 material is a distraction from Bausch’s core story: the plight of the rape victim.
The horror of 9/11 intersects with the horror of rape in this latest from Bausch (Something Is Out There, 2010, etc.).
Natasha Barrett and Michael Faulk meet at a dinner party in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. She’s the top aide to a Republican senator; he’s an Episcopal priest in Memphis. Natasha’s still recovering from the messy end of an affair; Faulk’s been bruised by a divorce. There’s an age gap (she’s 32, he’s 48), but love leaps across it; they will marry and leave their professions. Natasha isn’t credible as a political animal; Faulk has lost “something unnameable” in carrying out his pastoral duties. The future looks rosy (Faulk’s trust fund will cushion them), but hard times are coming for this pleasant, fuzzily defined couple. It’s September 2001. Faulk is in New York for a friend’s wedding and has mentioned visiting the twin towers. Natasha is vacationing in Jamaica with Constance, an older woman, when the news breaks. Is Faulk safe? The phones are down; Natasha is frantic. She starts drinking heavily, as do the other hotel guests. On the beach at night, she allows a handsome Cuban-American a kiss. Things get out of hand; he rapes her. She can’t confide in the cynical Constance, who’s seen that consensual kiss but not the aftermath. By the time she reunites with Faulk in Memphis, she’s a nervous wreck. Bausch faithfully reproduces the high anxiety of the time, having us ponder the irony that strangers, rubbed raw, confide in each other while Natasha, consumed by irrational guilt, cannot confide in her darling Faulk, who knows something is terribly wrong. As the situation drags on, it’s hard not to become impatient with Bausch’s failure to force a resolution.
Disappointing; the 9/11 material is a distraction from Bausch’s core story: the plight of the rape victim.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-26626-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
PROFILES
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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