Ford follows his much-celebrated The Sportswriter (1986), picking up the story about six years later, as Frank Bascombe, now in his 40s, emerges from the midlife crisis depicted in the earlier book. No longer a writer of any kind, Frank sells real estate in Haddam, New Jersey, during the boom period of the '80s. His promise as a fiction writerstill dwelled upon at lengthcan be the only explanation for his compulsive introspection as a realtor, a job he endows with all sorts of metaphysical qualities. Also a landlord and local entrepreneur, Bascombe is proof that the overexamined life may not be worth living. (He can't do anything without chewing it over first in Ford's typically turgid prose.) But Bascombe's suburban existentialism is more pathological than philosophic, an excuse for his failures as father, husband, and lover. But he is quite convinced of his moral and intellectual superiority: He scorns the local country-club Republicans, considers himself a small-scale social engineer of higher purpose, and finds solace in the wisdom of Emerson. Ford punctuates the slow-moving non-events of this overly long narrative with bland recitations of historical bites, valiantly trying to invest this fiction with profound social overtones. In reality, though, for all his "oracular" abilities, Frank is mute when it comes to "the intricate language of Love." He nearly blows a fine, post-bimbo relationship with a smart, sultry widow; and his ironic banter with his troubled son, who lives with his remarried mother, seems to hasten the odd teen's decline. Bascombe is part angry white male, and part new sensitive guy, but mostly just a smug fool, who lingers over every detail of his life with Harold Brodkey-style obsession. Humorless and full of sham insight ("We're all free agents"), though fans of the first installment will not be disappointed.
Pub Date: June 21, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-49265-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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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