Predictable soap, laden with psychobabble and silly clichés about relationships.
Neglected wife finds new love, in a glum tale by the author of Hawke’s Cove (2000), etc.
Cleo Grayson McCarthy, midlist novelist and middle-aged mother of two, flees her family for the mountains of New Hampshire in order to finish her manuscript. Sean, her insurance-agent mate, is a workaholic; he won’t miss her much, and she’s still sulking about the brief affair he had a while back. Cleo figures that her children, Tim and Lily, are old enough to do without her for a summer—besides, it’s high time Sean did his share of parenting. A lesbian pal lends her a lakeside cabin, and Cleo settles in, laptop and binoculars at the ready. Ostensibly birdwatching, she spots a sexy neighbor hanging out his faded jeans to dry. What, no wife? Actually, Ben Turner, a composer, was married once, according to local gossip. Cleo makes his acquaintance, and, little by little, they trade life stories. She, the only child of hard-drinking, upper-class WASPs, has never had much fun. Sean is attracted to stupid younger women, her children love (gasp) spongy white bread. Moreover, although Sean’s boisterous Irish-American family practically adopted shy Cleo, she doesn’t trust his mother, Alice, who tolerated her own husband’s philandering and once advised her to do the same. Cleo is not so inclined, however, when Sean dumps the kids with her in New Hampshire and pretends he’s working late every night. She enrolls Tim and Lily in summer camp and finds herself spending even more time with Ben. Turns out that his young wife, Talia, comatose after a diving accident, is slowly dying in a nursing home near Cameo Lake. Grieving, guilt-stricken Ben, a former rock star, composes advertising jingles to pay for her care. Will Sean stop fooling around with his succulent secretary? Will Talia die and leave Ben free to love again? Will Cleo ever stop whining? At the close, she’s virtually swept away by Mahler’s Fifth and Ben’s deeply moving “new, never performed concerto.”
Predictable soap, laden with psychobabble and silly clichés about relationships.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-1276-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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