Oates' "most personal" novel, as her publisher calls it, is also her smallest in scale. When we meet Marya Knauer, the novel's lean and secretive young heroine, she is an 8-year-old abandoned child in a squalid outpost of upstate New York; her father, a miner, has been murdered in a labor dispute and her mother, an alcoholic of whom Marya's memories are mostly cruel, has disappeared or been jailed. Living with the family of a kind but inattentive aunt and uncle, Marya fashions an identity that will carry her through ostracism, loneliness and, later, the determined pursuit of academic and literary honors: the identity of a gifted outsider. Unfortunately, Oates has chosen to render Marya's emotional development through a series of murky and flimsily connected vignettes, each having to do with a crucial character Marya encounters as she grows: an eccentric highschool teacher who encourages her to compete for a college scholarship and to write, and then succumbs to a nervous breakdown; a Roman Catholic priest who teaches her something about faith before he dies; a celebrated college professor who becomes her lover and dies; the editor of a literary journal who publishes her work, introduces her to an international literary coterie, and also dies. By employing characters as moody emotional object-lessons and then abrubtly jettisoning them, Oates may intend to suggest something about the difficulties of becoming a self-made woman or the jerkiness of modern life, but the result is contrived and unsatisfying: Most of the characters in this overwritten novel, including Marya, take on the otherwordly air of shadows stalking Oates' usual preoccupations: nihilism, feminism, death. In the end, when Marya, now 35, feels secure enough in her identity to contact her lost mother, the reader admires the novel's effort at closure and wants to care—but doesn't.
Pub Date: Feb. 24, 1985
ISBN: 0452280206
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1985
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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