Beattie, author of the acclaimed Chilly Scenes of Winter, once again pierces the peccadillos of our dissatisfied modern culture. Her landscape here is the wilderness of our modern "angst," with its postures, self-help rationalizations, and fickle lunges toward fast-food happiness and "success." Beattie's wacky pastiche centers around Country Daze, an ultrachic Yuppie magazine published from a small Vermont town. Ex-New Yorker Hildon is the editor/entrepreneur who has turned the contributions of a family of eccentrics into a surprising success story. Most prominent among these is Lucy Spenser, his insecure, lover/best friend for the past fifteen years, who now writes a bizarre Miss Lonelyhearts column and who mourns her recently ended, longtime romance by having an occasional sniff of cocaine and stolen afternoons in bed with her boss. Hildon has always loved Lucy and happily neglected his wife; but when his wife asks for a divorce, he finds his dream of marrying Lucy has lost its allure. Their peacefully maintained confusion ends, however, with the summer visit of Lucy's niece Nicole, a 14-year-old soap-opera star who is sent east for a dose of "real" and who tries to make sense of an idiotic world through her inane Hollywood fan-magazine metality. When Nicole's mother is killed, the girl becomes a permanent fixture for her confused aunt Lucy, who oddly warms to the idea of being Nicole's only real security. Instead of "Love always," the empty promise in her ex-lover's Hildon's letters, Lucy realizes that "Love sometimes" will have to do. Beattie's bland, farcical style often reduces characters to types we can laugh at, minimizing the depth of storyline and leaving the reader delightfully amused, but in an objective, dispassionate way. But past fans of her clear insight into our society's absurd rituals will welcome her latest offering, an engaging romp through the perils of modern life and mores.
Pub Date: June 10, 1985
ISBN: 0394744187
Page Count: -
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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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