Melancholic and whimsical at once, Thorpe’s novel is bumpy, quirky, and wholly original.
A father and daughter tour Lithuania in Thorpe’s (The Girls from Corona del Mar, 2014) odd and deceptively simple family saga that spans countries and generations.
As teenagers at Exeter, Lucas and Katya, drunk on love, impulsively decided to start a family (“Let’s make a baby, baby”). The relationship collapsed soon after; Lucas and Katya spent most of their daughter’s childhood semiestranged. Seventeen years later, the trio—Lucas, Katya, and now-teenage Vera—have arrived at a sort of hesitant familial equilibrium. And then Vera has a psychotic episode—or at least, it seems that way. The doctor is certain of the bipolar diagnosis; Vera herself is sure she’s fine. Lucas, now an English professor, isn’t sure what to think, but when a flier for educational tours of Vilnius appears in his faculty mailbox—“Experience History Firsthand”—he’s sure what to do. “It was an absurd idea,” he admits, “whisking her off to a strange Eastern European vacation in the midst of a mental health crisis,” and yet the idea of a father-daughter pilgrimage to his grandmother’s homeland strikes him as restorative, even hopeful. In Vilnius, the two bond over an endless itinerary of walking tours; internally, though, they’re both lost in their own worlds: Lucas is consumed by the mystery of his grandmother’s escape from the camps, while Vera’s attention is fixed on more recent history—what happened between her parents? And—a question for both of them—what is really happening inside Vera’s mind? Switching between Lucas’ endearing narration and Vera’s ultrateenage letters home to her boyfriend, Fang, the novel weaves a strange and strangely intoxicating web of histories, both personal and geopolitical. Perhaps as a reflection of her mental instability, Vera flickers in and out of focus. The book belongs instead to Lucas; it is his personal history that gives the novel its emotional weight.
Melancholic and whimsical at once, Thorpe’s novel is bumpy, quirky, and wholly original.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87577-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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