A ménage a trois with enormous potential that never quite gets aloft.
Slow-going, made-for-TV family drama about a waiflike NYC ballerina on the rise who fatally attracts the first violinist and his young married son: a first adult novel from children's author and editor McDonough (The Barbie Chronicles, 1999, etc.).
Virginia “Ginny” Valentine is the toothy, skinny upstart from Louisiana who shimmies her way to solo stardom in one Ballanchine production after another (The Four Temperaments being one of them), while aging, well-established Oscar Kornblatt adores her from the orchestra pit. He feeds her ravenous appetite and helps organize her life, and even brings her home on the Upper West Side to be fed by his patient, good-hearted wife, Ruth, who suggests they introduce her to one of their three grown sons. But Oscar has begun to bed her, too—until the Kornblatt family gathers for Thanksgiving dinner and Ruth comes upon her married-with-infant architect son, Gabriel, kissing Ginny passionately in a bedroom. What follows is the tortuous tale of their illicit affair, told in chapters of alternating points of view and in detail so excruciatingly drawn out that the actual loving gets quietly buried. McDonough backtracks ceaselessly to establish the limping relationship between Gabriel and his obsessive-compulsive wife, Penelope; her teenaged riding accident and later collision with a deer; Ruth’s volunteer activities and selfless need to mend; Oscar’s depressed ambition and hapless longing; and Ginny’s ballet training since early childhood. Curiously, the accumulated detail is general rather than specific, so that the reader ends up feeling swamped instead of sympathetic. The symbolic, retributive ending in a tragic accident reinforces the sensation that the author is pulling her characters’ strings with a heavy and moralistic hand.
A ménage a trois with enormous potential that never quite gets aloft.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50361-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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