Sugary but far from insubstantial: a definitive portrait of an era that’s all the better for not really trying to be one.
The yuppies are coming! Kurlansky, tackler of seemingly any nonfiction subject (Choice Cuts, 2002; 1968, 2004, etc.), distills his many passions into his first novel.
It’s the 1980s on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (before it was called the East Village, Alphabet City, or other real-estate-provided monikers), and Nathan Seltzer doesn’t want to sell out. He runs a copy shop in a building owned by his parents, with whom Nathan, his wife, and young daughter make up one of the neighborhood’s last old Jewish families. A copy chain is eyeing Nathan’s store, offering a cool half-million for it even as the area’s diverse hullabaloo is giving way to the first colonizing elements of gentrification. This is Nathan’s first dilemma. His second is his affair with Karoline, the frumpy-looking but suspiciously sexy daughter of the German owners of the Edelweiss Bakery, whom Nathan’s uncle Nusan (a Holocaust survivor of pitch-black humor) is convinced were Nazis. Meanwhile, over at the ramshackle Casita Meshugaloo, Chow Mein Vega (whose song “Yiddish Boogaloo” was sort of a Puerto Rican/Jewish anthem for the neighborhood) is trying without much success to grow vegetables like they do back on the island. There’s also the matter of the murder of Eli Rabinowitz, apparently by drug dealers, and a seemingly random shooting spree on the Fourth of July that’s got the cops interested. But the more novelistic elements here are of little interest. This is a story of people and places, not action and reaction. Kurlansky avoids the tired screeds against yuppification. Though there’s a definite air of the elegy here, he prefers just to celebrate the neighborhood as it is, a frothy, ever-changing stew of humanity: “drug dealers, family people, shopkeepers, observant Jews, secular Jews, all three Sals, and boogalistas alike.” Change is coming, but that’s not the end of the world.
Sugary but far from insubstantial: a definitive portrait of an era that’s all the better for not really trying to be one.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-44818-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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