Wall Street Journal editor Wells can turn a charming phrase—sometimes to the point of the saccharine—but this last of his...
A Cajun alligator hunter goes on the run after standing up to a racist sheriff whose nephew attacked his son.
After a justified fracas with the law, Logan LaBauve and Chilly Cox, a black teenager who came to the defense of Logan’s son Meely (the title character of Wells’s first, Meely LaBauve, 2000), must leave Meely behind, since he’s broken his leg. The two escape through the bayou in a pirogue (a Cajun canoe, according to the accompanying glossary). Surviving a water-moccasin, wasps, mosquitoes, and a crazy man in a boat, they hide from sheriff’s deputies and encounter a sweet old woman whose dead husband has been rocking on her back porch for days. Their luck improves when they run across an oil-field employee whose uncle has hunted with Logan. He introduces the two to Catfish Annie, a widow of some means and high moral character. The attraction between Logan, a widower, and the more educated Annie is obvious though left unspoken. After putting them up for a night, she arranges for a local cabbage farmer to drive them to Tupelo, Mississippi, where Chilly’s uncle has a farm. On the road, their truck is waylaid by a professor-turned-robber and his cronies—who bear an unmistakable resemblance to the felonious acting troupe Huck Finn encountered a century earlier. Once safely ensconced in Tupelo, Chilly, whose character has never been fully developed, drops out of the story while Logan goes home to check on Meely, now staying with his teacher (more shades of Twain). Then Logan heads to Florida, where he’s been offered a job on an alligator farm. He stops off to visit Annie, and romance blooms. She decides to drive him to Florida, and the storm of the title turns out to be a hurricane they barely survive.
Wall Street Journal editor Wells can turn a charming phrase—sometimes to the point of the saccharine—but this last of his bayou trilogy never matures into more than a string of picaresque adventures.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50525-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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
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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