Prototypical Updike: made new here and there by his ever-enviable novelistic skills, but marred by its more than passing...
A graceful panoramic depiction of individuals and their communities, which simultaneously echoes Updike’s 1968 novel, Couples, and may be as autobiographical a fiction as any he’s written.
The protagonist and viewpoint character is 70-year-old retiree Owen Mackenzie, who is stimulated by recurring, troubling dreams to recall experiences in the three “villages” where he’s spent most of his life: Willow, Pennsylvania, where Owen, sheltered and indulged by cautious parents, develops “his charmed, only-child sense of life”; Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Owen and his first wife Phyllis produce their four children while he builds the innovative computer software business that will make him rich; and Haskells Crossing in eastern Massachusetts (read: Updike’s longtime hometown of Ipswich), where he resides with second wife Julia, a former clergyman’s spouse acquired during the last of Owen’s numerous courses of adultery. The best parts of Villages are its early chapters, packed with delicately detailed observations of landscapes, interiors, and emotional states and felicitous sentences. By the time Owen undertakes his “practical scientific education” at M.I.T. and becomes involved with brainy, beautiful fellow student Phyllis Goodhue, Updike—ever the assiduous master of information pertaining to his characters’ livelihoods—has provided a really rather impressive crash course in the history and programming of computers. But then Owen begins his serial dalliances with (mostly married) neighbors and acquaintances, and the novel segues into the vigorous clinical sexual specificity that Updike (a) does better than almost anybody else now writing and (b) overdoes to an extent that blemishes even his best fiction. The story recovers somewhat toward its end, as Owen’s approaching death bestows a needed gravitas upon his compulsive egotism (about which, to be fair, Updike is unsparingly frank).
Prototypical Updike: made new here and there by his ever-enviable novelistic skills, but marred by its more than passing resemblance to books that he’s written too many times already.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4290-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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