This debut novel from Menaker (Friends and Relations, 1976, and The Old Left, 1987, stories) has all its author’s usual strengths and charm in setting, details, and people, though the story itself tries ambitiously for a breadth and weight that never quite convince. Jake Singer’s mother abandoned him when he was six years old by dying of a stroke, and his cardiologist father in effect abandoned him too, not by dying, but through his increasingly self-protective guardedness, stiffness, and reserve—and by effectively cutting his son off when, after college and some grad school in literature at Yale, Jake makes it clear that he’s never going to become a doctor himself. Turn to the 1970s, then, and you—ll find that Jake is 32, single, an English teacher at the Coventry school on Manhattan’s West Side—and in therapy with Dr. Ernesto Morales, the bearded, Cuban, Catholic, cunning, anticommunist shrink who gives wings and a fine, high hilarity to the first third of the story as he baffles, queries, pummels, tricks, lectures, and sometimes drags the hapless though far from unintelligent Jake through —the scourge he called the treatment,— not the least fun being Dr. Morales’s wonderfully (and perfectly) unidiomatic English (—But many questions are wolves hiding in the pants of a sheep—). As Jake, though, gains the self-assertiveness instilled by Dr. Morales and begins achieving more in life, the novel gradually achieves less, creeping into unnecessary complication and nearing the hyperbole of TV-drama—with a lover (later wife) who’s both knockout gorgeous and fabulously rich (with two adopted kids), and a mix of bad guys, a gun, a big packet of coincidences, even a chase in the country. If all this were tongue-in-cheek, the whole might cohere more happily, but the earnestness and rigor at the foundation match only uneasily the castle of sweets built up above. Work that’s gifted but still in big pieces of cloth, a kind of coat of several colors.
Pub Date: June 3, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-42206-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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