Heavy-handed introspection and earnest social realism.
Cranny’s second outing (The Storm, originally published as On Us They Poor Children, not reviewed) explores the disintegrating cohesiveness of an Irish Catholic community in 1957 Brooklyn.
Young Father Darcy gives a sermon preaching inclusiveness that makes him unpopular in a neighborhood already edgy with suspicion and resentment about encroaching change. The Dodgers are threatening to leave Ebbets Field for LA. Italians have already moved in and there are rumors about blacks and Hispanics. Red Dahlgren and his sister Annie, however, both feel stifled by the neighborhood’s narrow-mindedness. Red, a police detective secretly plans to escape to California with his Italian fiancée as soon as he can bring himself to tell his widowed mother. Annie, a high-school senior, dreams of escaping through her college scholarship. Although officially going steady with a luggish neighborhood boy, she is actually having a serious love affair with Toby Walters, the one black kid in her class, who also happens to be athletic and brilliant enough to have earned his own scholarship to Columbia. When Annie is raped and murdered, suspicion falls on Toby, and the crowd at Kerrigan’s bar shows definite mob tendencies. But Red’s buddy Jack Treacy, who returned from Korea emotionally damaged, suspects himself. A hopeless binge drunk, he wakes up the morning after Annie’s death with no memory of the previous night but with a scratched face and bloodied clothes. In guilty panic he goes to Father Darcy, who takes him to the precinct where Red, unbelievably assigned his own sister’s case, and his Jewish partner refuse to consider Treacy’s evidence. They want to believe Toby is guilty, and they have a witness, the unlikable Harry who stole Red’s first girlfriend while Red was in Korea. In a weird twist, the false witness, lying out of weakness, is portrayed as villainous, while the real villain comes across as troubled but basically decent.
Heavy-handed introspection and earnest social realism.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56649-232-7
Page Count: 308
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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