Oates' "most personal" novel, as her publisher calls it, is also her smallest in scale. When we meet Marya Knauer, the novel's lean and secretive young heroine, she is an 8-year-old abandoned child in a squalid outpost of upstate New York; her father, a miner, has been murdered in a labor dispute and her mother, an alcoholic of whom Marya's memories are mostly cruel, has disappeared or been jailed. Living with the family of a kind but inattentive aunt and uncle, Marya fashions an identity that will carry her through ostracism, loneliness and, later, the determined pursuit of academic and literary honors: the identity of a gifted outsider. Unfortunately, Oates has chosen to render Marya's emotional development through a series of murky and flimsily connected vignettes, each having to do with a crucial character Marya encounters as she grows: an eccentric highschool teacher who encourages her to compete for a college scholarship and to write, and then succumbs to a nervous breakdown; a Roman Catholic priest who teaches her something about faith before he dies; a celebrated college professor who becomes her lover and dies; the editor of a literary journal who publishes her work, introduces her to an international literary coterie, and also dies. By employing characters as moody emotional object-lessons and then abrubtly jettisoning them, Oates may intend to suggest something about the difficulties of becoming a self-made woman or the jerkiness of modern life, but the result is contrived and unsatisfying: Most of the characters in this overwritten novel, including Marya, take on the otherwordly air of shadows stalking Oates' usual preoccupations: nihilism, feminism, death. In the end, when Marya, now 35, feels secure enough in her identity to contact her lost mother, the reader admires the novel's effort at closure and wants to care—but doesn't.
Pub Date: Feb. 24, 1985
ISBN: 0452280206
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1985
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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