An emotional parable with an oddly bleak, Beckettian tone.
The aged antihero of Perdue’s black comedy Lee (1991) returns to explore a largely disappointing afterlife.
When Leland Pefley awakes, frozen and stiff, in a bleak landscape of decaying pines, he has no sense of confusion or displacement. Rather, as he proclaims in the opening sentence, he is quite sure that he has died. Lee also seems to immediately understand that for him the afterlife will be a quest, or at least a journey. He takes a quick survey of his possessions—a cane, eyeglasses, matches, a little money and even fewer cigarettes—and begins to walk. He falls in with some fellow travelers, segregated by classes according to the number of blankets each is able to hold onto, and quickly finds that hunger, thirst, cold and hemorrhoids are among the many human annoyances that death has not erased. In fact, while the landscape of his afterlife isn’t quite the same as his actual life, it is astonishingly familiar. Lee has one particular purpose: searching (or hankering, as he says) for his wife Judy, who died years before he did. Lee’s romantic yearnings are convincing, as he summons details of Judy’s physical appearance, the books she had read and the property they had shared. But ultimately the quest turns out to be less about Judy and more about Lee. In an oddly Wizard of Oz–like moment, he comes to understand the world that he had navigated, both before and after death, and to recognize what had been important to him before he became a jaded old man.
An emotional parable with an oddly bleak, Beckettian tone.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58567-871-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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