Another new fictional world entered, as Updike himself enters old age, with skills and ambitions very much intact.
Updike’s 20th novel is, like its predecessor, Gertrude and Claudius (2000), yet another illustration of this adventurous writer’s enduring curiosity, versatility, and stylistic energy.
In a single unbroken scene, well-known (if not precisely “famous”) painter Hope Chafetz is interviewed in her rural Vermont home by young New York City journalist Kathryn D’Angelo. Their day-long session begins as Kathryn probes for details about Hope’s first husband, Zack McCoy, an ebullient, self-destructive nonrepresentational painter (“America’s marvelous drip machine”) whose checkered career and violent accidental death unmistakably parallel the life and death of Jackson Pollock. Hope keeps meandering, the stern Kathryn keeps tugging her back to the subject at hand—and Updike gradually builds the reader’s confidence in his loose structuring, in which flashbacks of varying length and fullness are triggered by both random musings and pointed specific questions. The initial impression of contrivance fades, as the richness of detail has its way with us. The result is a compact panoramic view of the postwar “revolution” in American art, especially among the Long Island crowd surrounding Zack/Pollock; (sometimes forced and tedious) reiterations of conflicting theories about “the redemptive mission of paint” and the artist’s responsibilities to society and to himself; and Hope’s fragmented personal history, including her second marriage to commercially successful collagist Guy Holloway (another dead ringer, this time for Andy Warhol) and conflicted motherhood to the three children she bore him, a happy third marriage to a companionable stockbroker and art collector, and her sturdy passage into solitary, meditative old age. The story can be faulted for its cook’s-tour approach to the history of modern art, but its portrayal of the unillusioned Hope’s understanding of her limits, and of her difference and distance from the passionate risk-takers who were her contemporaries and confederates, is stunningly revealing.
Another new fictional world entered, as Updike himself enters old age, with skills and ambitions very much intact.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41490-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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