So lazy and off-the-cuff that one wonders if the author even bothered to reread her first draft.
Though billed as a novel, this very slight tale of a man and woman who switch souls on a stairway cedes about half its pages to an acerbic continuation of Weldon’s recent memoir, Auto da Fay (2003).
If only it were that engrossing. The narrative begins well enough, introducing us to Trisha, who gave up a modestly successful acting career nine years ago when she won the lottery but has now run through every penny. Selling all the expensive junk she acquired will barely cover her debts, so sexy, goodhearted, not-so-young Trisha goes to live above a dry-cleaners in a fringe-y section of London, promising the rapacious female proprietor that she will help out with the mending. “So far so good,” as Weldon writes after her cogent introduction of a heroine whose “soul was much like her mattress: soiled but comfortable.” Unfortunately, this phrase introduces the author’s rambling memories of her life and loves, which increasingly intrude into Trisha’s story and ensure that readers are captivated by neither. Just as we relax into Weldon’s amusingly cranky reminiscences, deciding that we will forgive the 73-year-old writer a certain amount of old-fart complaining (“our whole existence is threaded through with cheapo TV fiction”), we’re yanked back to Trisha or—worse—Peter, the yuppie who eventually ends up in her body and his tiresome girlfriend Doralee. (It’s symptomatic of the book’s general sloppiness that Doralee is “size 10 aiming for a size 8” in one chapter, a “size six thirty-two-year-old” 23 pages later.) Weldon’s eye for human weakness and vanity is as sharp and unforgiving as ever, and there’s mean-spirited fun to be had in her blistering account of husband Ron Weldon’s self-pity and self-serving contempt for his wife’s popular success. But she barely tries to make her absurd plot premise credible, or at least compelling, and she blows off her characters with a blood-soaked but silly finale.
So lazy and off-the-cuff that one wonders if the author even bothered to reread her first draft.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1787-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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