A meditation on a dystopian future that maintains a careful balance between social satire and purposeful provocation.
After the apocalypse, two former Hollywood pals find themselves at odds with one another.
Lethem is an odd duck on the best of days, so it’s no wonder his new novel imagines the end of the world through a peculiar lens. After his Big Lebowski–esque version of noir in The Feral Detective (2018), here he takes on the end of the world in a strange amalgamation of 1970s disaster movie, '80s yuppie comedy, and seemingly whatever else came out of the kitchen sink. The lead here is Alexander “Sandy” Duplessis, who, in the wake of a major disaster called the Arrest that wiped out (gasp!) television and then eventually the internet and all contemporary communications, became essentially a modern version of David Brin’s The Postman (1985), here called Journeyman. Our guy divides his time between making deliveries and studying under the local butcher. The Journeyman got stuck in rural New England when everything went to hell, visiting his sister Maddy’s farm in what seems to have become a feudal community in Maine. Things go sideways when Sandy’s old Yale roommate and Hollywood writing partner Peter Todbaum turns up in a nuclear “supercar” called The Blue Streak—modeled on the vehicle out of the old '70s post-apocalyptic movie Damnation Alley—that can apparently tunnel underground and operate underwater, among other things. The backstory is that the two men were working on a project in Hollywood (“Todbaum the bullshitter, Journeyman the hands on the keyboard”). But then something uncomfortable happened between Todbaum and Journeyman’s sister. Lethem is certainly capable of having gone full-on Cormac McCarthy here, but instead this is pretty much a sly play on post-apocalyptic fantasies, with the operative word being play. Superminimalist writing, short chapters, interstitial images from the Journeyman’s scrapbook, and Lethem’s unusual perspective make for odd bedfellows, but it’s a decent distraction from the real world right now.
A meditation on a dystopian future that maintains a careful balance between social satire and purposeful provocation.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293878-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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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