Wall Street Journal editor Wells can turn a charming phrase—sometimes to the point of the saccharine—but this last of his...
A Cajun alligator hunter goes on the run after standing up to a racist sheriff whose nephew attacked his son.
After a justified fracas with the law, Logan LaBauve and Chilly Cox, a black teenager who came to the defense of Logan’s son Meely (the title character of Wells’s first, Meely LaBauve, 2000), must leave Meely behind, since he’s broken his leg. The two escape through the bayou in a pirogue (a Cajun canoe, according to the accompanying glossary). Surviving a water-moccasin, wasps, mosquitoes, and a crazy man in a boat, they hide from sheriff’s deputies and encounter a sweet old woman whose dead husband has been rocking on her back porch for days. Their luck improves when they run across an oil-field employee whose uncle has hunted with Logan. He introduces the two to Catfish Annie, a widow of some means and high moral character. The attraction between Logan, a widower, and the more educated Annie is obvious though left unspoken. After putting them up for a night, she arranges for a local cabbage farmer to drive them to Tupelo, Mississippi, where Chilly’s uncle has a farm. On the road, their truck is waylaid by a professor-turned-robber and his cronies—who bear an unmistakable resemblance to the felonious acting troupe Huck Finn encountered a century earlier. Once safely ensconced in Tupelo, Chilly, whose character has never been fully developed, drops out of the story while Logan goes home to check on Meely, now staying with his teacher (more shades of Twain). Then Logan heads to Florida, where he’s been offered a job on an alligator farm. He stops off to visit Annie, and romance blooms. She decides to drive him to Florida, and the storm of the title turns out to be a hurricane they barely survive.
Wall Street Journal editor Wells can turn a charming phrase—sometimes to the point of the saccharine—but this last of his bayou trilogy never matures into more than a string of picaresque adventures.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50525-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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