Boyne’s singular villain and well-sustained tension merit a good audience.
An all-consuming ambition to be a successful writer drives a young man down unusual paths to literary acclaim in this compelling character study.
Boyne (The Heart’s Invisible Furies, 2017, etc.) opens his 11th novel for adults with novelist Erich Ackermann, 66, telling how he was beguiled by the handsome young would-be writer Maurice Swift, at whose urging Ackermann reveals his early life in Nazi Germany and a terrible secret. The revelations become Swift’s successful first novel, and Ackermann’s career collapses as the young man stokes media attention by disclosing his source. Cut to the Amalfi Coast home of Gore Vidal and a third-person narrator describing Swift’s visit with a different older gay writer. Vidal has some good sharp-edged lines as he concedes that the young man is well-read and a good writer, but he also finds him cruelly abusive to his latest mentor. What Vidal doesn’t perceive is Swift’s one glaring, possibly implausible shortcoming: He has no imagination for fiction, no good original ideas for a story. The tension rises as Boyne plays on the question of how far Swift will go for a winning idea. He is married in the next section, his second novel has flopped, and four more unassisted efforts were all rejected. Meanwhile his wife’s fictional debut is well-received, and she feels her second novel will be even better. This leads to a chilling confrontation, made all the more so as Boyne reveals why the wife’s narration addresses Swift as “you.” Other horrors lie ahead. The question of comeuppance is long left unanswered. Boyne lightens the book’s deep shadows and amorality with amusing jabs at the fame game behind literary life, with its blurbs and prizes, acolytes and endless envy.
Boyne’s singular villain and well-sustained tension merit a good audience.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2301-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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