“The mind grinds,” says writer earlier. So do reader’s teeth.
From storywriter and non-fictionist Farber, an inert and self-involved second novel (after Curves of Pursuit, 1984) about an affair between an older man and a young woman.
All starts when an aunt asks “the writer” if he’d be so good as to meet a niece who’s finishing a Ph.D., is interested in literature, etc. Sure. Even though the niece is newly married (her aunt doesn’t know it), the meeting goes—very well indeed. The girl’s interest is piqued rather than dampened when, seeing him again, she learns that “writer” is in the habit of hiring models to sit nude while he looks at them, or doesn’t, or makes notes, or does whatever it is genus “writer” does. Models soon become unnecessary as girl and writer embark on an affair of their own—one that before long includes many, many Polaroids that become increasingly up close and personal. But the overt sex (there’s plenty) is as nothing to the groans and somnolence induced by Farber’s missteps and affectations in the delivery of it. In deference to their age difference, the two take to calling each other father” and “my daughter” (father will later become “Zeus”), leading, among other things, to father’s saccharine habit of adjectivizing daughter (“Poor baby . . . cry-baby baby,” even “Good baby” and “Flexible baby”). Writer exults in “how she’s reawakened his love of story!” Yet he gets angry at his daughter for “reading his fiction as autobiography,” says that she “has no right to these stories,” goes even so far as to “retort” that “‘My thoughts are my own.’” A curious notion for a writer. This ghastly stuff continues without any quickening of either into a realized character anyone could care about. Writer, it seems, has had heart trouble, but now he’s better. “His heart. Amazing, that it keeps beating,” he comments. “Steady, undramatic. Over and over again.”
“The mind grinds,” says writer earlier. So do reader’s teeth.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-6972-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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