Masterfully detailed and elegant in all its parts but ultimately a novel that prioritizes the virtuoso skill of its...
In her signature crisp, exacting prose, Tuck’s (The Double Life of Liliane, 2015, etc.) seventh novel haunts the territory of marital jealously with delicacy and finesse.
The unnamed narrator of this slim book is a second wife, inheritor of two teenage stepchildren and all the well-thumbed habits of a previous marriage which consumed her husband’s youth and most of his passion. What the reader knows about the narrator’s husband is a series of small preferences—he is an avid tennis player; he “had good taste and dressed well—he wore bespoke shirts made in England”—from which we are led to infer both his basically callow nature and the narrator’s ambivalence toward her marriage. The narrator herself is far more interesting. She possesses a mimetic memory for incidental detail (she can recall outfits, menus, vintages of wine from events years in the past) coupled with a yearning for the kind of sophistication she imagines as wholly natural to the ex-wife our narrator refers to only as she. She is an almost entirely hypothetical creation whose habits, partialities, cultured languor, and equally cultured passion (before her marriage she was a gifted concert pianist) the narrator covets with a tricky blend of curiosity, jealousy, and desire. Indeed, so heady is the narrator’s longing for news of the ex-wife’s life, so convulsive the way she inserts herself into the shape the ex-wife has left behind, it is hard not to anticipate the story tending toward a climactic confrontation between the two wives after the fashion of a Hollywood psychodrama. Tuck is far too consummate and unusual a stylist to allow for any such bathos; however, the novel’s quiet rooms, fragmented form, sensual descriptions of food, wine, and fabric, and, above all, its dreamy pace combine to lull the reader into a reverie from which the actual plot’s sudden climax comes as a rude awakening.
Masterfully detailed and elegant in all its parts but ultimately a novel that prioritizes the virtuoso skill of its narration at the cost of a hastily staged conclusion.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2711-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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