A worthy, anarchic sequel for the lost souls and beautiful losers of Paris' blank generation.
The dope-addled misfits surrounding Vernon Subutex come to terms with their own existential crises.
Best known for Baise-Moi (1994) and its controversial film adaptation, Despentes earned a spot on the Booker Prize shortlist for this entry’s predecessor, Vernon Subutex 1 (2019), which hinged on the titular aging record store owner fallen on hard times and the constellation of junkies, punks, and other oddballs in his orbit. This is a direct sequel and definitely not a book for a casual reader to pick up without context. Fortunately, Despentes opens with a droll and sometimes cryptic rundown of the two dozen or so characters. While she establishes some progress for her emotionally stunted punk rockers, this messy continuation is a disquieting pandemonium of chaotic deeds. Where the first volume focused on our title character, this time the newly homeless DJ Vernon is banished to the streets of Paris, leaving a bit of a narrative vacuum filled by a spectacularly eccentric ensemble. There’s still a mystery to be solved in the videotaped confessions of the late rock star Alex Bleach, the MacGuffin of the first book, which are finally revealed and expose appalling trespasses against some of the cast. In the meantime, readers catch up with both principal and ancillary characters, even those, like Bleach, long dead. “We entered into rock music the way you enter a cathedral, remember, Vernon, and our story was a spaceship,” says Bleach in his taped confessions. “There were so many saints everywhere we didn’t know who to worship.” Perhaps Despentes is working through the stages of grief, because if the beginning was so very angry, here we find bargaining, depression, and just perhaps the seeds of reconciliation.
A worthy, anarchic sequel for the lost souls and beautiful losers of Paris' blank generation.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-85705-583-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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