Smart and hilarious.
Been to college lately? Here it is in all its glory, from the trigger warnings and the bias response teams to the hookups and the hashtags, served with plenty of kombucha and seasonally correct vegan stew.
Johnston's debut skewers life at Devon University in Havenport, a body double for Yale, from the buildings and clubs on campus to the white clam pizza in New Haven, including a nod to the 2015 Halloween-costume dust-up. Our hero is Ephraim Russell, a good-looking young white man and professor of English originally from a peanut farm in Alabama who was born to teach 19th-century literature, who "couldn't imagine a place he'd rather be" than Devon, who has a 4.4 out of 5 on RateMyProfessor.com, rare indeed. He has a beautiful African American girlfriend named D'Arcy, and he is up for tenure this year—life could not be better. But the fall semester will bring Eph low. Among the characters who play a role in his downfall are Lulu, a gorgeous, rich, and utterly cynical Manhattan freshman; Red, a seventh-year student not currently enrolled but leading the Progressive Students Alliance; and Milton Strauss, the popular 17th president of the university. The trouble unfolds in short chapters and articles from the Devon Daily, and, in more ways than one, it all starts with Mark Twain. This high-spirited, richly imagined, and brave novel is a delight to read. Here's a trigger warning, though: Since its relentless mockery of the campus political climate never actually acknowledges the reality of racism and sexual violence, it should not be read by those who lack a sense of humor. Also, the ending seems to suggest that the solution is to go back to the idyllic way things used be. That can't be right. But it's a satire! The whole point is to lighten up.
Smart and hilarious.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-22237-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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