An intellectual peep show whose ultimate meaning remains elusive.
Taylor’s second novel (Tales Out of School, 1995) is an inconsequential story, with considerable pretensions, about a brainy gay Jewish astronomy student, his brainy best friends (twins) and their super-brainy parents.
Gabriel Geismar is a mama’s boy with an overbearing father, a rabbi in New Orleans. Gabriel loves numbers, especially as they relate to the cosmos; his other love is male bodies, which he satisfies by visiting a bathhouse. Deliverance from the rabbi comes in 1970, when he wins a scholarship to Swarthmore, outside Philadelphia, and meets Marghie and Danny Hundert, fraternal twins, who both fall in love with him; he reciprocates Danny’s love, while Marghie becomes his big sister. The movie buff (Marghie) and the pacifist (Danny) are the children of Gregor Hundert, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who, along with other Hungarian Jews, developed the atom bomb at Los Alamos. Gabriel is in seventh heaven when the courtly, old-world parents take a shine to him: These, surely, are his rightful parents, not the rabbi and the rebbetzin, whose deaths are described with arch humor. The story meanders through the ’70s. Gabriel becomes a professor of astrophysics. Love affairs founder. Gabriel and Marghie ease their solitude with imaginary helpmates. Neither one is a fully formed, knowable character. We don’t know Danny either, though he defines himself in spectacular fashion, first by his vow of silence to protest the Vietnam war, then by his attempt to assassinate Kissinger. This was Danny’s project: “To get even. With the big perpetrators.” It’s hard to square it with the words from the Bhagavad Gita which are his father’s mantra: “[T]he good deeds a man has done defend him.” Gregor seems mocked by that mantra too, as he slips into dementia. The novel ends in irony and ambiguity as Gabriel, a more reliable “son” than the incarcerated Danny, scatters Gregor’s ashes in Budapest.
An intellectual peep show whose ultimate meaning remains elusive.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58642-143-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
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
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
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