It's been noticed by historians that when centuries turn they also encourage lots of end-of-the-world fantasies and falderal. O'Brien (Going After Cacciato, 1978) seems here to have fleshed out a brace of short stories, then made of this novel-length amalgam something that tries to be explosive—with a big, long fuse of apocalypticism. But this centerless, flogged-on, and jerry-built bomb of a book just sits there and fizzles, on and on and on. . . Short story #1—and the better of the two—concerns the youth of William Cowling. We see him in 1995, as he's digging an enormous hole outside his Montana home, not precisely sure whether he means to hide himself and his family in it before a nuclear holocaust—or whether he means to bring that about himself. What's clear, though, is that William has always been nuke-spooked. As a child in the Fifties, he fashioned a shelter for himself from a ping-pong table covered with lead pencils; such behavior moved his parents to take him to a psychologist even more spooked than William was. The period flavor here is outstanding innocence meeting infinity in nightmare. Short-story #2, which accounts for much more of the book, is unfortunately another matter. Here it's William gone to college in Montana, meeting up with Sarah Stouch, a cheerleader who, under the relentless pressures of the Vietnam-era, moves from pom-poms to clandestine arms-hoarding and terrorism. William and Sarah cleave to one another despite his better sense—but the scenes of their terrorist activities have to be some of the least credible, most cardboard in recent fiction. Sarah is too mercurial, William too sappy; the other characters are out of a comic book, without a hint of the truly murderously dangerous ineptitude of the kind in a book like, say, Max Crawford's The Bad Communist. Plot-shoots invariably seem forced; William has a consciousness that streams but never dams; and O'Brien's obviously strenuous effect at the end seems all to be for this: "What's wrong with me? Why am I alone? Why is there no panic? Why haven't governments been toppled? Why do we tolerate our own extinction? Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads? Why don't we scream it? Nuclear war!" This book—elaborately cobbled-up but weightless, trivial—almost answers these questions perfectly.
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1985
ISBN: 0140259104
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1985
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
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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