At times burdened by overblown prose and the weight of its own ambitions, this novel exhibits, particularly in...
Guzeman’s debut examines the impact of a dissolute artist’s self-absorption on already fractured families.
When Thomas Bayber, scion of a wealthy family he’s disappointed with his painterly ambitions, runs into the Kessler sisters during a 1963 summer vacation, he unknowingly seals all their fates. Beautiful but resentful Natalie, 17, and budding ornithologist Alice, 14, are both immediately smitten with Thomas, who, while sketching the Kessler family, insouciantly but not unwittingly pits the sisters against one another. The narrative shifts to 2007. Thomas, a world-renowned painter-turned–alcoholic recluse, has summoned to his musty Brooklyn digs the remnants of his entourage: Finch, an aging art history academic, recently widowed, who has been supporting the bankrupt Thomas for years, and Stephen, a marginally autistic, 30-something art appraiser whose career was scuttled by his Tourette’s-like honesty. Unveiling a portrait that is potentially worth millions, Thomas sets Finch and Stephen on a quest: The portrait, based on that long-ago Kessler sketch, is part of a triptych: There are two other panels out there somewhere…but where? In further flashbacks, we learn that Alice has suffered from rheumatoid arthritis since 1963; that she had a brief assignation with Thomas that resulted in a pregnancy and the theft of a valuable porcelain grosbeak; and that Natalie, charged with Alice’s care after their parents were killed in a car crash, resorted to some heartless expedients. Among these were spiriting her sister and herself from their childhood Connecticut home to a tiny Tennessee town. The true reasons for this dislocation will emerge as Finch and Stephen, whose feuding phobias make for entertaining road trips, traverse the country in search of clues. The whereabouts of Alice’s lost child (who Natalie said died at birth) is only one of the melodramatic elements that pile up like crash debris as the story lurches to its credulity-straining, redemptive close.
At times burdened by overblown prose and the weight of its own ambitions, this novel exhibits, particularly in characterization and dialogue, glimmers of genius.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8976-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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