![]() ![]() Les Nerds du Mal-and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.Īn amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. 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. 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. 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. 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. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. 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. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them-and they kill him. 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. The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. ![]() The contrasts are to be continued: sometimes the novel is appropriately, irritably enclosed within the monotony of its endless sand-scapes sometimes it is all as illusory as a mirage and as hypnotic. Abe (whose earlier influences were Poe, Kafka, Dostoevsky) has told his small story with all kinds of nuances from the ironic to the erverse on the other hand, he is more than explicit in the forbiddingly functional sexual detail. But "without the threat of punishment there is no joy in flight." He stays on willingly alone. Finally she is taken away and he is presumably free. His resentment of the woman who keeps him captive alternates with his combative sexual need for her (the elan vital versus "the beauty of sand which belonged to death.") His hopes of escape reduce but still he makes the attempt, only to be returned to her. There, in an inferno of heat and grit, the weeks pass. He is trapped in the house of a woman in an isolated village where the days are spent digging away the sand which threatens to bury them alive each night. Whatever interpretation beyond its seemingly excellent translation from the Japanese may be needed, this sepulchral tale follows the faint footprints of a dedicated antomologist who reaches the dunes to be pinioned there just as surely as the beetles he collects.
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