Although centered on a violent murder/suicide that takes place early on, this is essentially a meditative, multi-voiced examination of the guilts, prides and lonely accommodations to social class and family myth-making—matters also addressed in A Mother and Two Daughters (1982)—among members of an unhappy North Carolina family immobilized under "layer upon layer of debilitating resentments and intrigues." "It's like being inside a drama in which good influences and bad influences are being played out. . .it's impossible. . .to affix blame," comments urbane Felix, musing on the family of his lover, 40-ish Clare. What caused 28-year-old Theo Quick—a failure in both career and marriage, and father of young Jason—to shoot to death his girlfriend while her child watched, and then kill himself?. Each member of the grieving Quick family, Clare's childhood friend Julia, and Theo's divorced wife, the "hillbilly" Snow, bear their bewildered grief into the dark comers of their recent histories. Theo's father, Ralph, a selfmade man now bankrupt and disillusioned, from a "middling" background, too late tries to redeem the son he'd locked out. Ralph's wife Lily, self-elevated from husband and children, realizes—also too late—that it was Theo, rather than son Rare, she'd "trusted most to love her." Rare, in therapy, painfully calls to mind Theo's "flirting with the idea of his self-destruction." Meanwhile, plain-spoken Snow, who will win a custody battle for Jason, and who shares with Lily (they despise one another) a "secretive separateness" from family, sees a Theo plain, stripped of the caul of the family—yet aches for the essential good man who was buried-in-life. Clare (successful novelist and Lily's daughter by a first marriage), Julia, and Felix attempt to weigh the influences of class and origins on the Southern family, and shade in the portrait of Theo that is never complete—an echo of Theo's criticism of Clare's work: she should write something "that can never be wrapped up." A "slow march" (Clare's expression) of meditations in voices that sound somewhat similar (except for Snow's tangier diction), brightened by Godwin's acute sense of people paralyzed by circumstances—this is thoughtful chipping away at one family's crystalline certainties and disparate dreams.
Pub Date: Oct. 2, 1987
ISBN: 0380729873
Page Count: 548
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1987
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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