An exciting debut, if still in the process of formation.
A spirited debut embodies an intrinsic, disjointed portrait of a poor black street in L.A. pre the ’92 riots.
A motley collection of its hardscrabble residents tell the up-and-down story of Piedmont Street, named for the 19th-century lawyer who rid the area of “plaguing canine hordes,” according to one chapter’s “Official History.” The first citizen to set the ominous scene is Daniel, hustler turned preacher, who has been called by God—literally, out of bed one morning—to pound the pavement declaring His Word to indifferent and increasingly hostile sinners. He reappears from another angle as the odd, dreaded Uncle Daniel in “A Knock on the Door/Louise,” where he makes his increasingly ghastly appearance on Sunday before dinner to lecture his nieces on the Lord’s “divine plan.” Another local denizen who recounts her plight is piano teacher Cecile; having fallen on “a hard time (only temporary she was sure),” she is forced to line up at the pawnshop to sell her cherished Auntie’s moonstone brooch. The experience of dealing with the miserly pawnbroker becomes a creepy prefiguration of her fall from grace—and the cataclysmic fire that will follow. Some of these folksy character studies feel like complete short stories in themselves: “Red Lipstick/Albee & Lettie,” for example, about the impending meeting after many years of two middle-aged sisters, one healthy and Christian, the other prodigal and ailing, who are destined to rehash their smoldering family dynamic until death; or “Eve’s Daughter/Bernadette,” about the struggling seamstress Bernadette, who pulled herself out of poverty and away from her mother’s curse of morbidity by opening her own shop on Piedmont Street; now, fatigued by surviving her loved ones, she watches the signs of doom slowly appear in the area. The self-sufficient pieces can’t—not tidily—be tacked together to make a cohesive work, yet Barnes’s spare writing and poignant detail render her characters memorable.
An exciting debut, if still in the process of formation.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-932511-18-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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
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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