A multilayered thriller that tackles issues of race and history in America, but comes up short of a fully nuanced...
A present-day racist incident launches a search for answers about a 1907 lynching in the new novel by Morris (Cologne No. 10 for Men, 2007).
When racist graffiti defiles a highway near Ron Watkins’ new home in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, he remembers his mother’s warnings. Maryland was a slave state, she taught him, and the local white population has never forgotten its former violent dominance of blacks. Watkins has moved his family back to the East Coast from California in order to further his career and he has felt safe, if slightly conflicted, in his largely black neighborhood. But even as his neighbors—including one new white friend—chew over the vagaries of race and social issues, the past rears its head. Watkins’ great-grandfather was murdered by a lynch mob, he learns, and his family was forced to sell its farm on the very land where Watkins’ prosperous suburb now stands. Now Watkins wants to learn the truth and clear his great-grandfather’s name. However, the past lives for others, too: the local neo-Nazi group responsible for the hateful graffiti has plans for action—aimed directly at the Watkins and their new friends. Morris links the past and present stories through historical documents, half-remembered family lore and one very important letter, building up to parallel climaxes of danger and resolution. He has cast a wide range of characters with great awareness, from the more radical and angry blacks to those who observe no race divide in their personal matters, and from historically sensitive white people to their subtly prejudiced counterparts, focusing heavily on such details as skin and hair. The villains, however, lack the same fullness of character. While it is difficult to imagine much scope or intelligence among the racist characters, their one-dimensional portrayals—all hateful stupidity—weakens this otherwise sensitive study of race and history in the American South.
A multilayered thriller that tackles issues of race and history in America, but comes up short of a fully nuanced examination.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450203906
Page Count: 288
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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