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. Or is he? Abe's symbolic pantomime is not extroverted in fact it is very ingrown but it toys with images and ideas in a fascinating fashion, even while at the expense of both the reader's patience and sensibility. There follows an inevitable duality-his mask is almost another identity ("I casually accompanied the mask out.") and after a renewal of his erotic inclinations, he approaches his wife, realizes he is cuckolding himself. "A monster's face brings loneliness and the loneliness informs his heart." After consulting K, who constructs artificial organs, he decides to model a mask spends considerable time in investigations, calculations, and finally the choice of a type (aggressive extroverted) for which he will need a consonant personality. It not only alienates him, it isolates him. These notebooks are the record kept by a laboratory scientist whose face, after an accident, is covered with suppurating "leech-like" scars. And like Tanizaki, there's a certain morbidity of material. Perhaps more people viewed rather than read Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes (1964) and this sibling has very much the same character it is just as enclosed, physically and psychically just as intense, while using the most matter of fact detail-almost to the point of irritability.
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