For all its considerable pretension, Row’s debut novel offers few insights into the formation of racial consciousness.
A white guy has himself turned black through a total physical makeover in this disjointed first novel about racial identity, which follows Row's two story collections (Nobody Ever Gets Lost, 2011, etc.).
Two men, out of touch since they graduated from high school 20 years earlier, have a chance reunion on a Baltimore street. It’s Martin Wilkinson who stops Kelly Thorndike, because while Kelly doesn't look that different, Martin is now unrecognizable. He tells Kelly he's had “racial reassignment surgery” and is eager to go public about it. Kelly, who's the narrator, is hollowed out by the loss of his wife (who was Chinese) and daughter in a car accident; he's recently lost his job at a public radio station and agrees to help Martin tell his story. He visits Martin’s home and meets his wife, Robin. She's African-American, a high-powered child psychologist at Johns Hopkins; the couple has two adopted children, but Robin doesn’t know her husband’s secret. Martin is less forthcoming about his black-market electronics business. So, why did he do it? The answer is elusive. The son of a gay, nonobservant Jew, he spent his 20s distributing pot on the college circuit. His momentous decision came after a weed and peyote blowout, making it seem an elaborate lark. That Martin is one slick operator becomes even clearer in the concluding section in Bangkok, where he had his surgery. He introduces Kelly to Silpa, his Thai surgeon, and talks about expanding the racial reconstruction business, projecting brands and franchises, patents and payoffs. This is full-blown speculative fiction, a drastic change from the previously realistic framework; then, just as disorienting, Kelly dislodges Martin with his own identity crisis.
For all its considerable pretension, Row’s debut novel offers few insights into the formation of racial consciousness.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59448-834-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
PROFILES
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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