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BIG MACHINE

Too idea-hungry and haywire to be fully successful, too alive and abrasive to be missed. The multicultural novel has come of...

Lavalle (The Ecstatic, 2002, etc.) fractures all our tidy notions of how well-made fiction ought to behave in his singular tale of a bizarre quest that achieves apocalyptic fulfillment.

“Recovering” heroin addict and freelance criminal Ricky Rice encounters new temptations and challenges when he’s lured away from his nowhere janitorial job at the Utica, N.Y., bus station and transported to Vermont’s Northern Kingdom, to become part of an all-black group of petty crooks and whores at the Washburn Library, a forested compound founded by a runaway slave. Not resonant enough for you yet? Consider the resemblance of this novel’s plot to that of a classic American novel whose narrator-protagonist embarks on a perilous adventure, ignores a mad prophet’s warning and falls into the orbit of a deranged messiah prepared to sacrifice himself and his acolytes in a vengeful battle against the universe. Specifically, Ricky is enlisted as one of several “Unlikely Scholars” charged with researching paranormal phenomena and making connections between cosmic and historical injustices. His personal assignment: to travel to San Francisco, where Jim Jones–like extremist Solomon Clay is fomenting revolution—and ice the sucker. Further complications lurk in Ricky’s egregious past, for his worst sins have gone largely unpunished, despite the cleansing mayhem performed by a confrontational ur-feminist cult, the Washerwomen. Redemption may lurk in the eponymous Big Machine, explicitly defined as “Doubt [which] grinds up the delusions of women and men.” But there’s another Big Machine hovering in a physician’s office that partially explains the burden of guilt hanging like an albatross around Ricky’s neck. Further developments include the miracle of Ricky’s pregnancy (honestly); the suggestion that the Devil lives in California; and a hellacious climax set in San Francisco Bay that explicitly echoes the Shakespearean finale of Moby Dick.

Too idea-hungry and haywire to be fully successful, too alive and abrasive to be missed. The multicultural novel has come of age—smashingly.

Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-385-52798-9

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009

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THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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NORMAL PEOPLE

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

Awards & Accolades

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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

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