Stark and deeply effecting.
In this sequel, 12 years have passed since the fatal hit-and-run at the center of Schwartz’s Reservation Road (1998), and the focus turns from the father of the victim to the perpetrator of that crime and his long-estranged, now-grown son.
Former lawyer Dwight Arno served 30 months in prison for fleeing the scene after the car he was driving struck and killed his son Sam’s second-grade classmate. Dwight is building a tentative new life in California managing a sporting-goods store and dating Penny, a literature professor. He has had no contact with Sam for years. So he’s unprepared and a little thrilled when Sam, a college senior and varsity baseball star, suddenly shows up at his doorstop. Dwight feels he has been given a second chance at fatherhood, however strained the peace between them remains. Then Sam’s mother Ruth, who had already divorced Dwight before the accident and has recently left her second husband after a brush with breast cancer, informs Dwight why Sam has fled to California: He badly injured another boy in a bar fight, the boy is in critical condition, the university has expelled Sam and criminal charges may be brought. Ruth is fiercely protective of Sam. Soon she arrives to take him home to Connecticut. Dwight follows. Sam, horrified by his own capacity for violence and deeply confused, turns for support to Emma, the surviving sister of the boy Dwight killed; although their parents know nothing of their long-term relationship, the two understand each other’s pain. Ruth and Dwight struggle to find a common ground, while Penny realizes that learning the truth about Dwight’s past does not stop her feelings for him. Schwartz (The Commoner, 2008, etc.) uses a minimalist approach. The tone of the brief chapters is matter-of-fact, sometimes harsh. The characters, Sam and Dwight especially, are damaged souls capable of damaging others. But readers will grow to care deeply about whether and how their lives can be redeemed.
Stark and deeply effecting.Pub Date: July 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-679-60511-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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