Next book

MISS GOMEZ AND THE BRETHREN

First published in England in 1971, a rambling novel of lower-middle-class manners that lacks the distinctive qualities of the mature Trevor (After Rain, 1996, etc.). Despite the tell-tale mordant wit, the narrative slogs through an abundance of observed detail, and casts its panoramic eye so widely that it often loses focus. At the center of this shaggy story is the strange Jamaican woman Miss Gomez, orphaned when she alone survived a fire as a little girl. She eventually ran away from her orphanage, and stayed in Kingston until she got enough money to go to London. Now grown, the long-legged beauty works there as a cleaner until the promise of more money finds her stripping, then hooking. Her unhappy life changes when she discovers a pamphlet from a group back home: The Church of the Brethren of the Way. Unlike the forbidding religion of her youth, The Way promises nothing but forgiveness. Miss Gomez turns from her sinful life and follows a premonition to Crow Street, a desolate area of London that's being torn down for development. Her divinely inspired mission involves the prevention of a sex crime she's convinced will soon happen. With only two buildings inhabited in the neighborhood, there aren't many candidates for her violent scenario, but they do add up to some comic British types. The Thistle Arms houses the Tuke family—a boozy, mean mother, her dog-obsessed husband, and their sweet and pretty daughter, for whom Miss Gomez foresees a sad end. But Alban Roche, her putative abuser, in fact harbors the best of intentions, not revealed until Miss Gomez's hysterical rants have sent some bumbling bobbies and Fleet Street sleazoids into action. Back in Jamaica, Miss Gomez learns the true nature of the religious faith that has inspired her mania, but still never loses her hard-won belief in the power of prayer and Divine Intervention. Early work, strictly for fans, who are (justifiably) legion.

Pub Date: May 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-14-025264-9

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Penguin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997

Categories:
Next book

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

Categories:
Next book

OF MICE AND MEN

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

Categories:
Close Quickview