Readable and mildly engaging but lacking fresh insights into very familiar material.
Another historical novel from de Bernières (A Partisan’s Daughter, 2008, etc.): the agreeable, albeit predictable saga of an English family transformed by World War I.
It begins with the usual scene of prewar tranquility, in this case a 1902 coronation party in suburban London. Mr. and Mrs. McCosh, an investor/inventor and his eccentric wife, contentedly survey their four daughters. Beautiful Rosie, though only 12, already plans to marry the handsome boy next door, Ashbridge Pendennis. Somehow it seems inevitable, as the action jumps ahead 12 years and Ash announces that he’s enlisted immediately after becoming engaged to Rosie, that he won’t survive and will leave her grieving in a morbidly unhealthy way. Indeed, although a good portion of the book concerns the combat experiences of Ash in the infantry and Daniel Pitt, another London neighbor, in the Royal Flying Corps, its central subject is the adjustments everyone must make afterward. It’s not just veterans who miss the sense of purpose wartime service brought; Rosie’s sisters, who all did volunteer work, are both enticed and made restless by the expanded vistas for women that open after 1918. Their mother is horrified by this and every other postwar social change, described in the boilerplate passages de Bernières favors for scene-setting. Daniel waits patiently for Rosie to get over Ash, but that doesn’t happen even after they’re married. We get pretty tired of mopey Rosie, and although Christabel, Ottilie, and Sophie McCosh are livelier, each is a one-note outline—Christabel loves another woman, Ottilie is serenely mysterious, Sophie adorably misuses esoteric words—rather than a fully fleshed character. The large supporting cast is also sketched in broad strokes as the story moves forward, centered mostly on Rosie and Daniel. Their try for a new start in a new location, coupled with an abrupt ending and a hint in the author’s acknowledgments, suggests the McCoshes and kith will be making further appearances.
Readable and mildly engaging but lacking fresh insights into very familiar material.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-94648-0
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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