A tedious investigation of a dying marriage that lacks the elegance associated with the genre.
She’s taken a lover. He’s devastated. A marriage breaks up in this determinedly abstract novella from Steiner (The Catastrophe, 1996, etc.).
They’ve been married 20 years, this nameless couple. We don’t know much about them. She’s a globe-trotting artist with a flourishing career. He has an unchallenging desk job. They’re sitting on the terrace of their home in the South of France, overlooking an olive grove. She has confessed to an affair with a lover in Paris and will be leaving her husband. Their marriage had become claustrophobic, she claims. They are no longer compatible. Her new love is “a mad love, perhaps doomed, but beautiful.” She does not elaborate. The focus is on the husband, the narrator. This is a very French work by an American. Steiner has incorporated some elements of the nouveau roman. Plot and character are out. In their place is a reality shaped by the artful deployment of key words, phrases and objects. A key recurring phrase is “the ordeal of the postmortem.” Taken together with a key word, “nonexistence,” the meaning is clear. The death of his marriage will entail the death of his spirit. He will be forced to conduct an autopsy on himself. Rather than make these points to his wife, he makes them to himself in a monologue, since she has stepped away to pack her suitcases. The cerebral is interrupted by the carnal when he recalls their sex life. Their first kiss led to sex in an elevator operated by a handicapped man. She would often arouse him in public places by going nude underneath her Burberry; “nude” is another key word. Yet the overall effect is more clinical than erotic. There’s a surprise ending, but it does not offer a way out of the maze that Steiner has constructed.
A tedious investigation of a dying marriage that lacks the elegance associated with the genre.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58243-642-5
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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