What I need is a master guide to the wisdom, an exclusive service in the ideal location of the world, say, where you give all your money and all you ever hope to have, and in return you receive a generosity of beneficent hygienically balanced natural unradiated lifelight and you get to live and write a minimum hundred and fifty years, give or take a decade, and the cock never fails you." So writes Jonathan, Doctorow's angst-ridden alter ego in the title novella here, as he begins his free-associative ramble through the social, sexual, and political twitchings of a middle-aged N.Y. writer. Jonathan, spending more and more time away from his fastidious Connecticut wife, holing up in a Soho studio, contemplates all the crumbling marriages around them, "the phenomenon of the neither married nor divorced but no longer entirely together . . . I see the small spaces men end up with for their lives, and there is terror, and the disgusted reproach of children, and the lapse into dereliction of men who have taken down their establishements, and I know I risk all that." He broods on death, immigration, the subways, his health, crime, the CIA, aging, artists' careers, his long-dead father, Rilke's androgyny, his own iffy affair with a jet-hopping, independent woman ("CIA cunt"), the fates of Wilhelm Reich, Linus Pauling, Bishop Pike. And, providing a slender narrative thread, there's a moral/political decision for Jonathan to make: should he or shouldn't he provide illegal sanctuary to rebel fugitives from El Salvador? (He should: "Look, my country, what you've done to me, what I have to do to live with myself.") Throughout, there's a fundamental sentimentality beneath Doctorow's dour, sardonic observations and anecdotes; the attempts to churn up an eclectic socio-cultural swirl around one writer's psyche sometimes reads like pale-imitation Mailer, an artificial gathering of notebook jottings. (At least two images or anecdotes appear, in nearly identical form, in other stories here.) Still, with enough basic material for a humdrum middle-aged-writer novel compressed into 60 dense pages, this is an undeniably lively and varied mosaic, shards of existential anguish side by side with tidbits of literary gossip and mini-editorials. And, while five of the shorter pieces are Doctorow at his most labored and schematic (studies in sexual psychopathology, a fable/history of the American outcast-type), "The Writer in the Family" is a plain, affecting memoir of writer Jonathan as a Bronx teenager—stunned by his father's death, making discoveries about his parents' marriage, using his writing ability to sustain (and then destroy) family myths. In sum: a slight collection, lacking a distinctive voice—but with modest rewards for Doctorow's more cerebral and/or political admirers.
Pub Date: Nov. 23, 1984
ISBN: 0812981189
Page Count: 147
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1984
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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