Sharply observed and dryly funny, but it somewhat too aptly illustrates Julie's warning to Luke that real life is not like...
A highly touted Bright Young Brit profiles six aimless friends marking time in Essex.
Actually, about two thirds of the way through the story they pile into a camper van and head toward Wales to meet a Chinese healer Luke hopes will cure his rare, fatal allergy to sunlight. Until he gets under the blankets in the van, though, Luke is stuck in his room watching TV, chatting on the Internet, and waiting for visits from best friend Julie and sort-of girlfriend Leanne. It’s not much of a life for a 25-year-old, but then Julie, a math and science whiz who deliberately flunked her university entrance exams, is a waitress, while Leanne is a nightmarishly rigid sales clerk in a Blockbuster Video. (Her browbeating a customer over an obviously incorrect late fee is one of the funniest scenes here.) David, a cook at the restaurant where Julie works, has testicular cancer; Charlotte, just back after fleeing a year ago when her boyfriend died suddenly, is glamorous but sad. Only Leanne's good-natured cousin Chantel has any luck: she just won the lottery and bought the camper for the Wales trip. Getting out of town initially doesn’t help anyone. They’re creeping along backroads because Julie, in addition to refusing to eat prepared food (someone might spike it with LSD) or take express trains (they might crash), is as terrified of highways as she is of storms. Naturally, they leave in the middle of a downpour and encounter flooded roads. Nonetheless, Thomas (Dead Clever, 2003, etc.) doles out various tentative redemptions to her characters; they're appropriate and quite touching, but don't much lighten the gray portrait she’s etched of young people adrift in an indifferent-to-hostile society, taking little pleasure from the drugs and sex they casually indulge in, fond of each other (possibly excepting the bitchy Leanne) but unsure how that helps.
Sharply observed and dryly funny, but it somewhat too aptly illustrates Julie's warning to Luke that real life is not like TV: “Stuff happens and there just is no structure.”Pub Date: June 8, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-7531-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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
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
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