Elegant and melancholy yet surprisingly optimistic, warmed by full-bodied characterizations and expert delineation of...
A modern-day Rosenkavalier, as atmospherically situated among Manhattan’s affluent Jewish elite as the Strauss opera was among Vienna’s aristocrats.
In the sexy opening scene, 48-year-old Marian Kahn is making love with 26-year-old Oliver Stern while late-afternoon traffic blares on Park Avenue below her apartment. She’s a married history professor at Columbia who’s written a surprise bestseller about an 18th-century American adventuress; he runs an ultra-chic Village flower shop called The White Rose and is the son of her oldest friend. Their midday idyll turns to farce with the unannounced arrival of Marian’s stuffy cousin, Barton Ochstein, come to boast of his engagement to Sophie Klein, a Columbia grad student (doing her thesis on an anti-Nazi group called the White Rose) whose super-rich but definitely-not-Our-Crowd father Mort is eager to find a gentlemanly caretaker for his daughter and his billions. Funny, Marian had always assumed Barton was gay, and he certainly takes a lascivious interest in Oliver, who’s scrambled into some of Marian’s clothes and a wig to introduce himself as her assistant Olivia. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess that “Olivia” will play a role in scuttling Barton’s unsuitable match with intellectual, unworldly Sophie, but this is the only clumsy note in an otherwise deftly plotted narrative. Koreltiz (The Sabbathday River, 1999, etc.) provides glimpses of her characters’ pasts to explain their motivations, she shows people changing in ways that are sometimes painful but usually necessary and always plausible, she makes Oliver’s and Sophie’s youthful confusions as compelling as Marian’s middle-aged ruefulness. The supporting cast is equally well-imagined (though Marian’s husband should have been more than an offstage presence), and the author provides knowledgeable background material on everything from the New York publishing scene to the Rockefeller drug laws. In crisp, unsentimental prose, she gently traces the inevitable disintegration of Marian’s affair with Oliver and shows both of them making new commitments, which will come as a relief to readers who have grown to really care about these people and hope for their happiness.
Elegant and melancholy yet surprisingly optimistic, warmed by full-bodied characterizations and expert delineation of complex emotions.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4013-5231-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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