by Robert Stone ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 9, 1981
Four Americans converge on a Central-American banana dictatorship called Tecan—and each of them is clearly ready for some internal shake-up. Frank Holliwell, an anthropologist suffering from anomie, has been invited down by the Tecan national university to give a lecture—and he's also been asked to do some snooping around by CIA buddies he'd known from Vietnam days. Pablo Tabor, a young paranoid speed-freak Coast-Guard deserter, has signed on aboard a gun-running boat set to deliver arms to Tecan rebels. Sister Justin Feeney, a young Devotionist nun, is about to be pulled from her Tecan coast dispensary by her order (she's a supporter of the rebels). And Father Egan, Justin's co-missionary, is a priest who's steadily more pickled with brandy and visions of the Demiurge and the Pleroma. These, four, in fact—the intellectual wimp adrift in history, the bad-news outcast, the tragically strong woman, the released-of-it-all gnostic—are pretty much the usual cast of a Stone novel (A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers): four compass points that themselves stagger under generally vicious circumstances. Stone's hallmark—scenes of menace—is on lavish display here too: corpses in freezers; a woman threatened with a gun at her head while frozen burgers are arranged around her supine body; at least three shipboard murders. And the violence seems very right, made inevitable by the tone of dark historical despair underlying everything. But whereas A Hall of Mirrors and, even more, Dog Soldiers spiked toward catharsis (novels as plotted as Stone's surely seem to demand one), here the fever-break is absent—with oddly ill-timed, often premature climaxes which make us feel like we're guttering instead of steadily climbing. True, there's no shortage of dramatic movements here: Holliwell and Sister Justin have a brief and mutually-embarrassing amour; there are truly awful murders, torture, a failed revolt, an exhaustion of motive. But the working-out of the story finally seems not much more cutting (only more hard-boiled) than the vector in a book like The Bridge at San Luis Rey (fate—and cynicism—bringing people together only to destroy them); and whole sections are fumbly, purple at times, contrived enough even to resort to an eavesdropping scene. And yet, all that said, this is also the work of a truly powerful, unduplicated voice. No American writer does crazy dangerous people better—perhaps because no American novelist finds the strain of pusillanimity in contemporary Americans quite as scary as Stone does: "Pablo took himself out on deck again, the anticipated clean clothes he carried were just a useless embarrassment now. He was nearly enraged. It was a hell of a thing not to get a shower when you wanted one. It was a bring-down. It made you negative." And, more agonized than even a Naipaul over history's black holes, Stone lights every page with the superiority of his prose: the great descending speed of his paragraphs, hipness turning ecclesiastical, the extraordinary cynical ventriloquisms of much of the dialogue. Writing on this sure a ad powerful level is not to be ignored—even when its container, as here, seems poorly weighted and subject to leaks.
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1981
ISBN: 0679737626
Page Count: 680
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1981
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by Robert Stone & Alan Andres
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by Robert Stone
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by Robert Stone
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
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
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by Donna Tartt
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by Donna Tartt
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Madeline Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 10, 2018
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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