In one very short novel and five short stories, Godwin continues to monitor—with a kind of wary bemusement—the fascinating whorls and asocial display of personalities lost within their own outsize needs and dilemmas. In Mr. Bedford and the Muses, narrator Carrie Ames reconstructs her young days in London (1962-64) when she boarded, along with a handful of other young people, with the Eastons—a middle-aged American couple, mysteriously exiled, still retaining the "outlines" of undoubted privilege and "former beauty." Mrs. Easton orchestrates the postprandial "family" social hour like a duchess, after cooking the best meals in London; Mr. Easton polishes his favorite bizarre anecdote—about a lady with a tail—for each new guest. But the Eastons also lie, steal, and play favorites. So Carrie is alternately chilled and warmed, delighted, enraged, hurt, and amused. . . and catches the past splendor of the Eastons' grand "burning of bridges" before a tail-flick of caprice moved them into the shoddy present. In "Cultural Exchange," a young woman boards with an elderly Dane, an authoritarian old tyrant who has driven away one son and reduced the other to childhood irresponsibility—and she "slips into the role of dutiful daughter," both uneasy and glowing with his approbation (again, as in Mr. Bedford, manipulated by another's fathomless, imperious need). In "A Father's Pleasures," a concert pianist gives his son an extraordinary gift—the father's young second wife—while he himself marries again and continues to play Liszt, his romanticism misting over a cruel past. In "Amanuensis" and "St. John," two writers of fiction wrestle with their blocks and their solitude: one is "released" by companionship—thanks to some vengeful dirty tricks; the other, drawn to the "strange, lonely and mad," finds a bizarre and wonderful passion. And, in the serio/comic "The Angry Year," a pre-Sixties college freshman, wavering between rebellious rage and frat/sorority belonging, hunts down within herself "the crass conformist. . . inside the rebel." In sum: luminous fictions, full of quiet, patiently earned discoveries.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1983
ISBN: 0345390210
Page Count: 229
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983
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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