Ultimately, Ellie’s novel is erotic, prurient and kind of boring.
The subtitle “An Erotic Novel,” makes it clear what to expect from Becker’s first novel, translated from its original French: Fifty Shades of Grey sex weighted (or balanced depending on one’s taste) with literary pretentions.
In this metafiction, Ellie, who shares the author’s last name, writes a novel about her 10-month affair with the married Parisian surgeon she refers to as Monsieur. Ellie took her first lover, a 30-year-old, when she was 15. Now 20, a literature student living at home, Ellie pursues 46-year-old Monsieur before actually meeting him because her uncle has mentioned in passing his medical colleague’s interest in erotic literature. After Monsieur responds to her email sharing her similar interest, they carry on a sexually explicit if highly intellectual conversation through emails, texts and phone calls. Ellie is soon meeting him for Tuesday morning trysts in a hotel room. As a sign of trust, they do not use protection against STDs, despite their lack of exclusivity, or hygiene. Few will be surprised to learn that he dominates her in various ways, and she enjoys the submission, at least at first. He lets her visit him at the hospital, where their desire must be contained, barely, in front of others. Initially, she is not crazy about the anal sex—and there is a lot of anal sex—but she grows to love it. The descriptions of what goes where, particularly his hands and her “arse,” the ecstatic nature of pain and desire, domination and submission, are evocative but get repetitive after awhile. Soon, his limited time to spare becomes a problem as her physical obsession grows. Her purely sexual interest becomes more emotional than she wants to admit. Refusing to break off completely, he seems to play with her dependence, but perhaps he is as secretly obsessed as Ellie. It is hard to say because Ellie admits she learns almost nothing about him. Neither does the reader, who will find Ellie herself increasingly sad.
Ultimately, Ellie’s novel is erotic, prurient and kind of boring.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61145-761-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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