The Snow Garden
by Christopher Rice
|
Talk Miramax Books, Hyperion, Pocket (New York): 2001. Mass-market paperback: 544 pages. ISBN-10: 0-7434-7038-9 ISBN-13: 978-0743470384 Suggested retail price: $7.99 (US) Tags: alcohol; art history; college life; cults; Hieronymus Bosch; homosexuality; murder; Mystery; poisoning; Psycological Tactical strength: [6/10] |
Compare prices on The Snow Garden by Christopher Rice at Book Cost
Freshman Randall Stone has gotten himself into some serious problems at Atherton University, an ivy-league school in Massachusetts. Randall takes an art history class from professor Eric Eberman, and even before we know much about Randall or Eric, Randall engages Eric in a homosexual affair. Shortly after the affair begins, Eric's wife dies in a car accident. Randall suspects that Eric has killed Mrs. Eberman in order to make having the affair with Randall easier. As Randall starts to investigate, he learns that while Eric attended Atherton as a student, another woman Eric dated died mysteriously.
The cast of The Snow Garden also includes other Freshmen in Randall's circle, and each one seems to have brought terrible psychological baggage with them to school. Randall's best friend Kathryn lived in San Francisco. During her senior year in high school she started dating a college-age man, Jono. Jono works at a bar and gets Kathryn as much alcohol as she wants, but while on a date with Kathryn, Jono falls into the San Francisco Bay and dies. After Jono's death, Kathryn learns that Jono was sleeping with about ten other girls and supplied all the other girls with drugs.
Randall's roommate, Jesse, quickly gained a reputation of having sex with a new girl every night. Jesse has a perfect athlete's body, and Randal has difficulty not reacting sexually to Jesse's sculpted body. Kathryn despises Jesse as a reflection of Jono, yet when she has conversations with Jesse, he seems to give her the most honest and straightforward conversation out of any of the characters. Jesse get suspicious when he realizes that Randall can never keep the story about Randall's parents straight, and Jesse does some research that uncovers some disturbing possibilities about Randall's past.
Christopher Rice, son of popular horror writer Anne Rice, does an excellent job at developing his characters into real people. He seem to prefer writing about characters with extreme character flaws, and you might think from The Snow Garden that today's college students all smoke, drink, and have terrible home lives that all freshmen must overcome. Rice uses an omniscient point of view to allow us to see the inner workings of Randall and Kathryn. Generally, you would guess that Rice has made Randall his main character, but the conclusion of the book really shows that Kathryn better fits the definition of a main character. She experiences radical changes and epiphanies that help her resolve her issues about Jono and men in general. I think Rice should have done more to bring Kathryn to the foreground as the clear protagonist, but perhaps he decided that focusing too much on Kathryn would interfere with the development and resolution of his quite convoluted plot.
Rice has a clean and direct writing style well suited to the mystery genre, but he keeps too many of his clues hidden from the reader far to long. For the most part, he avoids flowery prose, but he does have a few repetitious comparisons that start to become quite noticeable and almost annoying. For example, when his characters react to stress, he often describes them as looking like children. Without going back and counting, I would guess that Rice describes Randall as looking like a pouting or sad little boy at least ten times. Sure, an eighteen-year-old boy will frequently look like a boy at one time and a man at another, but Rice's overuse of this character description distracts from an otherwise well constructed and developed novel. As Rice's second novel released when he was only twenty-two years old, The Snow Garden gives us the pleasant hope of enjoying his works over a long and prolific writing career.
Related Item from Amazon.com
  Hardcover |
