Well-narrated plot and credible people—but told in a gossipy, insider’s tone likely to put off anyone not in (or interested...
A mannered, somewhat formulaic account of a critic’s long and complicated friendship with an artist, presented by Hustvedt (Yonder, 1998, etc.) with just a touch of melodrama amid the melancholy.
Bill Wechsler is a nice Jewish boy from suburban New Jersey who, after college, came to New York, in the 1940s, to paint. With first wife Lucille, he had his only child—a son, Mark. For decades, Bill worked in obscurity, making money in the daytime, painting in the evenings, his work so atypical that few galleries knew what to make of it. But then, in 1975, the Columbia critic and art historian Leo Hertzberg buys one of Bill’s paintings at a SoHo gallery, and the two become close friends. Partly because of Leo’s interest, Bill is soon widely recognized. He and second wife Violet (a suicidal NYU student) buy a loft in the same building that Leo lives in with his wife Erica and son Matthew, and the two families become almost one household for several years, even sharing a summer house in Vermont. After Matthew dies in a boating accident at summer camp, however, he withdraws into his grief—compounded not long afterward when Bill dies of a heart attack. Leo tries to look out for the now fatherless Mark, who’s become a fixture of the downtown club scene and has nearly overdosed several times—but Leo had to back off after discovering Mark’s theft of $7,000 from him. Eventually, Mark becomes friends of the transgressive artist Teddy Giles, whose portraits of corpses have made him a sensation in the art world. But Teddy is soon arrested for the murder of his 13-year-old boyfriend, and Mark is implicated in the crime. For Leo, by now an older man, it is one more reminder that the world has become a stranger and a grayer place without Bill in it.
Well-narrated plot and credible people—but told in a gossipy, insider’s tone likely to put off anyone not in (or interested in) the New York art world.Pub Date: March 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-7170-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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