However well intended, overwrought and unconvincing.
A young woman, torn between the certainties of life in India and the potentially liberating challenges of America, undergoes an arranged Islamic marriage—with disastrous results.
As in so many similar stories, the writer is most effective in describing local customs, ceremonies, locations (the city of Hyderabad), and cultures—here, the workings of an Islamic society in a majority Hindu country. But first-timer Ali is less successful in telling a compelling tale or creating credible characters. Her protagonist, 19-year-old Layla, has since childhood spent half of each year in the US with her mother and father, a doctor, and half the year in India. She appreciates the freedoms and opportunities the US offers, but also enjoys the comforting rituals and rules of India. As a result, both to please her mother and to secure a home for herself, she agrees to marry Sameer, a college graduate. But in the year between her engagement and marriage, she has an affair with Nate, an American, and when she arrives in India for the wedding, she’s pregnant. Soon, her bleeding suggests a miscarriage, but, for a doctor’s daughter, Layla is strangely reluctant to seek medical help, though everyone seems to know about the hemorrhaging. The wedding takes place, but that very night Sameer finds letters from Nate. He promises to forgive Layla but fails to consummate the marriage. While Sameer works to get money to pay for their trip to Madras to obtain his visa, Layla enjoys the household routine and religious rituals. But Sameer keeps disappearing, makes no sexual overtures, and their trip to Madras, supposed to be a honeymoon, reveals the truth about him when his male lover follows them there. But Sameer and both families are determined to continue the marriage, even though Islamic law allows divorce. As Layla finds herself a prisoner, tensions between Muslims and Hindus heat up, a favorite cousin is raped and murdered, and, realizing how vulnerable women are, Layla decides to escape.
However well intended, overwrought and unconvincing.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-19562-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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
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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