by Snowden Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2019
Too much exposition is not the problem here—it's too little relevant information.
The rise and fall of a fictitious cola empire and its founding family.
Perhaps the only throughline in Wright’s (Play Pretty Blues, 2013) chaotic second novel is the mystery of the secret ingredient in Panola Cola, aka PanCola, formulated by Mississippi pharmacist Houghton Forster, the only son of Scottish immigrants. Unfortunately, no one knows who, among three generations of PanCola heirs and heiresses, inherited PanCola’s exact recipe. The significance of “the secret” is gainsaid, however, by factories’ continuing to churn out a product which holds its own against Coke and Pepsi. Houghton’s offspring—Montgomery, the oldest; daughter Ramsey; her fraternal twin, Lance; and Harold, who seems to be on the autism spectrum—have little to do with the family business. Only Monty’s children, Imogene, disabled by polio, and her reckless brother, Nicholas, have ambitions for PanCola, but for some reason, inexplicable to both her and readers, Imogene is disinherited. From the 19th century through the 1970s, the Forsters gain and lose a fortune. The "Malediction” accidentally called down by the Forster matriarch, Fiona, on her descendants is mostly treated as an afterthought until, suddenly and belatedly, it’s not. The plot’s discontinuity is aggravated by an insouciant disregard for chronology. An arch, omniscient authorial voice dips into multiple psyches, and here Wright almost succeeds in holding our interest. Ramsey and her exploits in Paris as the lover of Josephine Baker, Lance’s unfortunate introduction to hunting, Montgomery’s gay love affair as a teenage World War I doughboy and his forays into politics, and Harold, the bellwether child of family trauma, all engage us emotionally, as do minor characters like the family factotum and fixer, Branchwater. The language is replete with irony and recognizably Southern witticisms, e.g., “Sarah…was constantly saying she was at her ‘wit’s end’ despite the obvious lack of a beginning." Flashbacks and flash-forwards abound, and often, on the verge of a crucial revelation, the action digresses along some anecdotal path, never to return.
Too much exposition is not the problem here—it's too little relevant information.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-269774-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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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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SEEN & HEARD
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SEEN & HEARD
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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