by Samuel Berkman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2006
An impressive debut novel; hopefully, there’s more.
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A boy’s coming-of-age story runs through this debut novel filled with Cold War history (including a cameo by Willy Brandt) about a scary struggle with a villainous family.
In 1960s France, Roy Harrison’s lawyer father, Steve, is serving a stint with the Air Force Reserve in Alsace-Lorraine. They’ve had a difficult relationship since Roy’s mother died a few years ago, and Roy didn’t want to go, but his father insisted. A man of discipline and few words, Steve is trying his best to be a good father, though intimacy doesn’t come easily to him. He enrolls Roy in a lycée, pitching him headfirst into French culture—not a welcoming atmosphere for an American kid. Barely speaking French is the least of Roy’s difficulties. One of his classmates, Robert LePerrier, goes out of his way to bully and abuse him for no discernible reason. Readers will be well into the tale before the back story emerges, detailing the LePerrier family’s sordid activities during WWII and their toxic attitudes that have infected their son. Their story (father Jean-Claude’s specifically) brings in two real-life figures from the past: the notorious Klaus Barbie, “Butcher of Lyon,” and Jean Moulin, hero of the Resistance. Steve confronts the LePerrier patriarch, exposing his dark past and bringing him to trial. Meanwhile, Roy has become fluent in French and has—much to his surprise but not the reader’s—come to love his place in France and his French friends. He has grown up; his father is proud of him—and says so. At times, reactions from characters can be a bit over-the-top, not matching the provocations. Nevertheless, the narrative is nicely bookended by passages set in Paris in 1999, when Roy runs into Robert, his old nemesis. They will never be close, but they understand each other. In the epilogue—later that weekend—Dr. Harrison flies home to the States and to his wife and his kids and his good life.
An impressive debut novel; hopefully, there’s more.Pub Date: May 5, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-595-67332-2
Page Count: 214
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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 John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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