There’s no denying Whitbread Award winner Cusk’s talent and gimlet eye for revealing details, but she used to have more...
Diamond-hard portrait of family life as warfare.
Sometimes it’s a simmering conflict, like Thomas and Tonie Bradshaw experiencing confusion and resentment over their redefined roles as he takes a leave of absence to care for their daughter Alexa when Tonie is promoted from part-time lecturer to full-time head of her university’s English department. Sometimes it’s loud, disorderly combat, prompted by Thomas’ brother Howard perennially augmenting the chaos in his household while wife Claudia wails that all these kids and animals and stuff are keeping her from painting. It can be ugly hand-to-hand maneuvers for advantage, as the men’s father, Charles, refuses to have tea because his wife is late, or forces her to get rid of six boxes containing childhood mementos, which she weepily manipulates Thomas into storing in his much smaller house. Or it can be the detonation of really nasty landmines: “What a waste!” moans Mrs. Swann when daughter Tonie proudly displays new curtains she had made from antique silk. “I’ve got boxes of old pairs I could have given you…all beautifully lined, with proper pelmets.” Only the youngest Bradshaw brother Leo and his wife Susie don’t seem aggressive—and that’s because they’re drunk most of the time, as their young children are well aware. The Swanns and elder Bradshaws are cold, withholding monsters, Claudia is a professional martyr, Howard is jovially clueless, Leo and Susie are drowning in insecurity; Thomas and Tonie, though more substantially characterized, are no more engaging. The plot, such as it is, lurches forward during Thomas’ year at home as he becomes unmoored and Tonie is tempted by infidelity, developments that both play a role in Alexa’s near-fatal bout of meningitis. Somehow it’s no surprise that this dark tale climaxes with the dog dying.
There’s no denying Whitbread Award winner Cusk’s talent and gimlet eye for revealing details, but she used to have more compassion for human frailty than she’s displayed in her recent work (The Last Supper, 2009, etc.).Pub Date: April 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-10081-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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