This pleasantly embellished and prettily fringed historical tale moves forward without building much dramatic tension.
The real-life 1889 murder of Charleston newspaper editor Frank Dawson is the inspiration for Southern storyteller Baldwin’s latest (Heaven Is a Beautiful Place, 2000, etc.).
Three years after an earthquake flattened the city of Charleston, S.C., Dawson, a prominent liberal, was violently murdered by a local doctor, a man who’d been scheming to elope with the Dawsons’ Swiss nanny. Baldwin lightly fictionalizes this tale, setting up a complicated web of intrigues and unfulfilled loves that center around the life of David Lawton and his literary wife, Rebecca. Also featured are Rebecca’s sister Abbie; Abbie’s estranged husband, André; the governess, Hélène; and the mysterious figure of a psychic/prostitute alternately called Mary, Mrs. Patrick or Madame Chazzar. Midway through the tale, the narrator reveals himself to be the aspiring belletrist son of this mysterious woman, who may or may not also be Lawton’s illegitimate son. The story has many twists, but the multiple leaps through time, which seem to layer and deepen the plot’s various mysteries, add a slightly hollow mystique for which there is no eventual payback.
This pleasantly embellished and prettily fringed historical tale moves forward without building much dramatic tension.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-57003-602-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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SEEN & HEARD
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