A graceful exploration of loneliness, “their true covenant,” and the worm that gnaws at the heart of all things.
Call it Peyton Place with Uzis: Israeli novelist Hedaya finds the worm in an exceedingly shiny apple.
Best known for writing the Israeli TV series and HBO import In Treatment, Hedaya shows a marked fascination in the way people think—or, often, fail to think. Of one character, Alona, he writes, by way of example, “Her mind had wandered to two different places, as if she were walking two dogs, each pulling in the opposite direction.” Alona has reason to be confused. Like the other residents of the gated community of Eden, a place set off from the lesser denizens of Israeli society but not entirely free of them, she’s a mess: her soon-to-be-ex-husband is always around; one of her teenage kids is a budding sexpot and boozer in training; and her other kid wallows in depression. Or maybe not. “He’s not depressed, says Mark, her estranged spouse. "On the contrary, Alona, he’s flourishing. You just can’t see it.” Mark’s got troubles of his own, but at least the Italian restaurant he recently opened “at the edge of the moshav, right in the woods, on land the council had agreed to lease to him practically for free” has a chance of surviving. Daughter Roni, on the other hand, seems bent on self-destruction, though she harbors a not-so-secret desire to get pregnant. So does Dafna, their neighbor, who has tried every method of fertilization that science has to offer. And so it is in Eden, a place of intertwining lives founded by Holocaust survivors as a socialist farming collective, now devolved into a California-style sea of one- and two-story pastel bungalows and mini-mansions, where nothing much happens—but when it does, it speaks to the baser instincts of humans. Just so, Hedaya’s novel moves from page to page without much action but with plenty of mutual misunderstanding and miscommunication—
the very stuff, in other words, of life.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9265-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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