Overstuffed and overwritten.
Poet, memoirist and novelist Bathanti (Creative Writing/Appalachian State Univ.; Half of What I Say Is Meaningless, 2014, etc.) tells an expansive story in his newest work of fiction.
The book opens with the narrator, George, hiding out in Queen, “a small, but aspiring city, in the middle of North Carolina.” There, he meets Crow, a tormented young woman who works in a café. Their attachment anchors the present action of Bathanti’s novel, though he spends a great deal of time in the past as well—specifically, in Pittsburgh, where he traces the criminal entanglements (unwise bets, malevolent mobsters) that led to George’s, despite his bright-seeming future, lamming it in the South. This is the stuff of pulp, of course, and Bathanti populates his novel with seedy bookies, threatening criminals and dangerous women. But Bathanti wants to make art, too, circling a number of serious issues, including economic disparity, regional clashes, religion, etc. Unfortunately, his story—which lurches from noir to bildungsroman to romance to road novel—feels too hectic to investigate any of its themes fully. The writing itself doesn’t help. George is an overly stylized narrator, and a poetic voice bogs everything down. Consider this description of roadkill: “Dead possums and raccoons, even the occasional desiccated deer, lay at the shoulders, or gaping in dead bloody wonder on the blazing double yellow that bisects the flat eternal road to the sea.” Or consider this doozy, which describes (I think) a tornado: “the unholy caprice of that one mutant cloud, like placenta, its umbilici drooling down, vacuuming up the earth.” Such figurative language obfuscates the story rather than clarifying it. There are terrific scenes—particularly a moment of sudden, inexplicable brutality at a Middle Eastern restaurant—but the novel, as a whole, feels like a slog.
Overstuffed and overwritten.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61117-453-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2014
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
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
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