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OUR STORY BEGINS

NEW AND SELECTED STORIES

Richard Yates, Raymond Carver and Robert Stone are the modern masters whom Wolff most resembles. Like their best work, his...

An impressive range of contemporary experience is distilled into crisp, urgent little dramas in this story collection from Wolff (Old School, 2003, etc.).

The book features 21 previously published stories and ten new stories. A number of the entries, Wolff notes, have been slightly revised for the purposes of the collection. Troubled families are a recurring subject: “The Liar,” for example, concerns a teenaged boy whose compulsive prevarications are both defense mechanisms and strategies for achieving a necessary maturity, and the beautifully paced, Cheever-like “The Rich Brother” depicts the frustrating bond between two contrasting adult siblings. Wolff reaches convincingly beyond the quotidian in a sinuously plotted tale about three men (“Hunters in the Snow”) whose taunting horseplay whiplashes into an explosion of rage and violence, and an equally tense account of an underachieving career soldier whose screw-ups are echoed in varied relationships with his buddies, superior officers and married girlfriend (“Soldier’s Joy”). Even when comic detail predominates, these are dark visions, animated and accelerated by a sense of ever-present danger and general unconcern (e.g., a hitchhiker passed by cars bearing numerous different state license plates “felt like the whole country had turned its back on him”). Both the new and old stories display Wolff’s versatility: his mastery of oddly angled viewpoints (“Her Dog”); an incisive understanding of how inchoate teenage emotion can distract and alienate (“Deep Kiss”—which compares quite interestingly with “The Liar”); and a potent grasp of how lives replete with event and adventure may expand generously when touched by others’ lives (“A Mature Student”).

Richard Yates, Raymond Carver and Robert Stone are the modern masters whom Wolff most resembles. Like their best work, his own exhibits classic richness and depth, and it’s built to last.

Pub Date: March 28, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-4000-4459-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008

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CONCLAVE

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...

Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.

Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”

An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.

Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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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