Atmospheric and quietly moving: a tale that manages to avoid outright bathos as it makes its way along the narrow boundary...
A continuation of Berry’s Port William, Kentucky, saga (Jayber Crow, 2000, etc.), this one told from the perspective of an elderly farmwife looking back on her life and world.
Hannah Coulter comes from that long-past generation of rural Americans who fully expect their lives to pass as uneventfully as their parents’ and grandparents’ and God only knows how many ancestors’ before them. A girl during the hard years of the Great Depression, Hannah experiences want at an early age and learns to make do with little and hope for even less. After growing up on a farm, and after high school, she goes to work as a secretary for a local lawyer and marries her landlady’s nephew Virgil, who gives her one daughter just before he goes overseas in WWII and dies in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, she marries Nathan, another veteran, who comes from humbler circumstances but works hard to make a living on a small Port William farm for his wife and stepdaughter and their two subsequent sons. Her story takes in the better part of the late 20th century and amounts to a kind of elegy for the starkly beautiful country life that Hannah had always taken for granted but came to love all the more as it faded into history, victim of economic and social change. Her three children all make their way through college and drift from home to become academics and entrepreneurs, while Nathan is more and more hard-pressed to keep the farm running. When he eventually dies of cancer, Hannah thinks the book has finally closed on the Coulter farm—but last-minute help from an expected quarter gives hope to the possibility that a new generation will take charge of the family legacy.
Atmospheric and quietly moving: a tale that manages to avoid outright bathos as it makes its way along the narrow boundary between memoir and nostalgia.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2004
ISBN: 1-59376-036-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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
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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