As densely detailed as ever, a surpassingly intelligent and profound tale of our time.
One of the finest efforts from the massively gifted Powers (Gain, 1998, etc.), who again probes the fluid buffer between science and the imagination, between hope and despair, as two disparate situations—one about a disillusioned artist and the challenge of virtual reality, the other about a hostage in wartorn Beirut—whorl together in a heartwarming fusion.
For Adie, secure in New York's commercial art scene in 1986, the move to Seattle to join a cuttingedge project to build the first virtualreality room reengages her with an art she had abandoned with disgust years before. An experience in ``the Cavern,'' where bright colors and the crudely imaged bees of Crayon World draw her in, leads her first to enter the magical landscapes of Rousseau, then to capture the intensity of van Gogh’s Provençal bedroom at noon, and culminates in her grand conception—the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul realized at life-size. As Adie first takes up the VR challenge, however, a different drama unfolds in Beirut, where Taimur, a newly arrived teacher of English from Chicago, is kidnapped by the bloodiest of the warring factions. Deprived of sight, movement, conversation, and books, and occasionally beaten unconscious, he relies solely on his imaginative resources to stave off madness as weeks stretch to months, months to years. After an unspeakable period without solace, his mind walks him down the streets of Chicago and into the museum where the same Provençal sun draws him into a different room. There, he can finally be free. But despair once more grabs hold of him, just when Adie's discovery (prompted by incessant images of the Gulf War's smart bombs) that VR is a tool for the military as much as for the artist, proves her undoing. In the dark time they now share, both begin to see something new.
As densely detailed as ever, a surpassingly intelligent and profound tale of our time.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-23461-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by...
Almost as frustrating as it is commanding, McCarthy’s ninth (and first since the completion of his Border Trilogy: Cities of the Plain, 1998, etc.) is a formidable display of stunningly written scenes that don’t quite cohere into a fully satisfying narrative.
It’s a bleak chronicle of murder, revenge and implacable fate pocked with numerous echoes of McCarthy’s great Blood Meridian (1985). Here, the story’s set in 1980 in southern Texas near the Mexican border, where aging Sheriff Bell, a decorated WWII veteran, broods heroically over the territory he’s sworn to protect, while—in a superb, sorrowful monologue—acknowledging the omnipresence of ineradicable evil all around him. Then the focus trains itself on Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss, a hunter who stumbles upon several dead bodies, a stash of Mexican heroin and more than $2 million in cash that he absconds with. The tale then leaps among the hunted (Moss), an escaped killer (Anton Chigurh), whose crimes include double-crossing the drug cartel from which the money was taken, the Army Special Forces freelancer (Carson Wells) hired by druglords and—in dogged pursuit of all the horrors spawned by their several interactions—the intrepid, however flawed and guilty, stoical Sheriff Bell: perhaps the most fully human and sympathetic character McCarthy has ever created. The justly praised near-biblical style, an artful fusion of brisk declarative sentences and vivid, simple images, confers horrific intensity on the escalating violence and chaos, while precisely dramatizing the sense of nemesis that pursues and punishes McCarthy’s characters (scorpions in a sealed bottle). But this eloquent melodrama is seriously weakened by its insufficiently varied reiterated message: “if you were Satan . . . tryin to bring the human race to its knees, what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by William Faulkner.Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40677-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.
Things are about to get bloody for a group of Charleston housewives.
In 1988, the scariest thing in former nurse Patricia Campbell’s life is showing up to book club, since she hasn’t read the book. It’s hard to get any reading done between raising two kids, Blue and Korey, picking up after her husband, Carter, a psychiatrist, and taking care of her live-in mother-in-law, Miss Mary, who seems to have dementia. It doesn’t help that the books chosen by the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant are just plain boring. But when fellow book-club member Kitty gives Patricia a gloriously trashy true-crime novel, Patricia is instantly hooked, and soon she’s attending a very different kind of book club with Kitty and her friends Grace, Slick, and Maryellen. She has a full plate at home, but Patricia values her new friendships and still longs for a bit of excitement. When James Harris moves in down the street, the women are intrigued. Who is this handsome night owl, and why does Miss Mary insist that she knows him? A series of horrific events stretches Patricia’s nerves and her Southern civility to the breaking point. (A skin-crawling scene involving a horde of rats is a standout.) She just knows James is up to no good, but getting anyone to believe her is a Sisyphean feat. After all, she’s just a housewife. Hendrix juxtaposes the hypnotic mundanity of suburbia (which has a few dark underpinnings of its own) against an insidious evil that has taken root in Patricia’s insular neighborhood. It’s gratifying to see her grow from someone who apologizes for apologizing to a fiercely brave woman determined to do the right thing—hopefully with the help of her friends. Hendrix (We Sold Our Souls, 2018, etc.) cleverly sprinkles in nods to well-established vampire lore, and the fact that he’s a master at conjuring heady 1990s nostalgia is just the icing on what is his best book yet.
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68369-143-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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