One of Updike’s more intriguing experiments – but not one of his successes. (Book-of-the-Month main selection)
A risky and ultimately unsatisfying departure from what we’ve come to think of as Updike’s distinctive territory: suburbia and its discontents.
Here, he retells the story of Hamlet’s mother, the adulterous queen, and her brother-in-law and lover, in the years leading to Prince “Amleth’s” return from college in Wittenberg, to bury his father and attend the marriage of his mother and uncle. Updike’s sources include Shakespeare’s primary one, Saxo Grammaticus’ 12th-century Historia Danica, as well as Hamlet itself, from which he quotes sporadically (noting, for instance, that the lovers exchange “reechy kisses”). The novel is best in its first half: a clever re-creation of late medieval Scandinavia’s tangled power struggles and of the austere court of famed warrior Horwendil the Jute, who wed reluctant young “Gerutha” and became king of Denmark (then Zealand) upon her father’s death. The sly figure of Horwendil’s “dark” brother Feng(on), a “freelance” adventurer whose tales of foreign lands seduce Gerutha (exactly as Othello’s enchanted Desdemona) into intimacy, is quite convincingly evoked. Alas, once Gerutha and “Feng” (later Gertrude and Claudius, for reasons only partially spelt out) hit the sheets (this is Updike, after all), the hitherto lean and credibly stately prose often becomes, if not quite royal, certifiably purple (“Surges of sensation in her lower parts lifted her so high her voice was flung from her like a bird’s lost call”). It isn’t all risible, though. Long restrained tensions between “King Hamlet” (his name likewise having changed) and the wily Feng explode in a taut confrontation scene. Gertrude’s transformation from unwilling bride to weary, guilt-ridden matron is deftly traced. And the offstage presence, as it were, of her brooding, “theatrical” son – an aggrieved time bomb ticking steadily away – is expertly sketched in. Yet the abrupt inconclusive ending (even though we know precisely what’s to come) is almost certainly a mistake.
One of Updike’s more intriguing experiments – but not one of his successes. (Book-of-the-Month main selection)Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40908-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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