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THE TOWN OF WHISPERING DOLLS

Name: THE TOWN OF WHISPERING DOLLS
Author: Susan Neville
ISBN: 978-1-57366-185-0

by Susan Neville ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020

A potent combination of style and substance that loses some steam halfway through.

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A set of 19 Rust Belt stories that reject the label “flyover country" with arresting strangeness.

Neville (Fabrication, 2009, etc.) seduces a reader with language, but there’s nothing romantic about her words. The book is haunted and haunting, not only by a group of roaming dolls, but by the consequences of American empire. "Grotto," the opening story, makes for a mysterious and disturbing kickoff: Narrated by "the mother of a girl who is now a doll,” the story introduces a chorus of dolls that sing by removing their heads. "As you know, the heads are empty. And so the singing comes from the emptiness at the base of the head, like wind blowing over the neck of a bottle. I can't say where the breath comes from, but it always comes." The following stories illuminate the area’s history, geography, and economy, providing context for the dolls and the people struggling to survive. With the mill shut down and farms displaced, the locals can sometimes earn a bit of money by dressing up in "head scarves and choir robes" to play captured civilians at the army base’s fake Middle Eastern villages for training exercises. These circumstances are deranged, perhaps even more than “a plague of dolls” infiltrating a community already beset by poverty, drugs, and environmental degradation. Neville has a lack of cynicism while confronting these crises that makes the stories searing. The narrator of "The Plume" says matter-of-factly, “Why am I telling you this? Out of love, I suppose, for this little strip of human habitation. Out of anger. Out of the wish to confess.” The second half of the collection has some terrific writing but is less impressive than the first. Once the dolls disappear, the stories read like simple premises rather than complete and complex narratives, and the conceit of the book loses its vigor.

A potent combination of style and substance that loses some steam halfway through.

Pub Date: March 3, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-57366-185-0

Page Count: 192

Publisher: FC2/Univ. of Alabama

Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.