Price (The Wanderers, Bloodbrothers) left the Bronx behind with Ladies Man, putting all his remarkably pent-up novelistic energies onto the shoulders of increasingly articulate but shudderingly jumpy young men—the newest of which is Peter Keller, this book's narrator and (in a way) only character. Peter is the first college grad in his lower-middle-class Yonkers family—and as if that is some obscure sin, he promptly sabotages a brightish future by taking demeaning jobs (the Post Office, telephone solicitation). Then, to provoke his wimpy father and stepmother even further, Peter gets himself into real trouble by making bomb threats on the phone. He's caught, probationed—and, in the worst of several plot-lurches here, he's rescued by his friend Fat Jack, who (as department chairman) hires Peter to be a freshman-composition instructor at his alma mater in upstate New York. And there, in the small college town, Peter comes to meet older-woman Kim Fonesca—who's separated from husband Tony (a streetwise yet failed writer also on the faculty), who writes stories herself (more successfully than Tony), but who soon reveals that she needs a regular beat-me-then-stroke-me cycle from men. Hall a dozen times in this longish book, then, Price fastens onto a meld of intricate emotional needs—ambition, masochism, self-destruction—and astounding hysterics: Peter with his parents; Kim's sexual requirements; Peter's obsessive need to never let things well enough alone; Tony's desperate search for his once-glimpsed promise. Each time, however, the tension and energy collapse: each emotional drama gets caught against the wall as Price revolves the door too fast. And, since everyone in the novel—like Peter—turns out to be an obscure sinner-and-atoner, a whining monotony eventually takes over. Still, there are wonderful pages here: Price in his junior-Lenny-Bruce suit halls clown everything second-rate in extraordinary paragraphs of description; Peter at his best recalls some of Philip Roth's men, who are never unaware of how terribly they are mucking things up. And, though flabby and badly timed as a novel (the good climax comes far too late to be truly effective), this is grimly involving in fits and starts—and evidence of a stretching, growing, if problematic talent.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1982
ISBN: 0312566514
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1982
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
