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PHONE

Name: PHONE
Author: Will Self
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2537-8

by Will Self ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 2018

A multilayered, multivocal, and long-awaited pleasure for the Self-absorbed.

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Zack Busner returns, and, “tired and confused,” he’s melting away into air as the world goes mad in Self’s (Shark, 2014, etc.) magnum opus.

Zack, who has appeared in many of Self’s stories and novels, including Great Apes and Umbrella, is losing his mooring to the world, so much so that his withdrawn grandson has given him a cellphone so he can keep in touch. “You don’t gotta have an abstract sorta noise-thingy,” explains the grandson of the ringtone. “You can download a tune, or even someone singing an old pop song.” The cellphone is endlessly noisy. After a stream-of-consciousness opening, Self locates kindred phones in the hands and pockets of other players, notably recurrent character Jonathan De’Ath, an intelligence agent known as “the Butcher,” who ponders the whole business of “waiting for a lover, an agent, an asset—a phone call.” He’s not so bad, protests De’Ath; it’s his closeted, hidden boyfriend, Gawain Thomas, a military officer who has served around the world and seen combat in plenty of unhappy places, who’s done the real misdeeds. Zack, who has done specialized work in healing the psychic wounds of war veterans, is heading down the road of dementia; he still has the presence of mind, though, to puzzle over things like autism (“a canary of the coalmine of the human condition”) and the mysteries of memory (“dreams and emotions all deformed by the decades they’d spent buried deep in the system”). Meanwhile, De’Ath and Thomas wrestle with demons of their own in Self’s onrushing narrative, more than 600 pages without a paragraph break, inside which nothing much happens but a lot gets talked and thought about. Self makes subtle nods to modernist classics such as Ulysses along the way, unironically making Zack a kind of Leopold Bloom, though in his anxieties and preoccupations he could be someone from the pages of Howard Jacobson.

A multilayered, multivocal, and long-awaited pleasure for the Self-absorbed.

Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2537-8

Page Count: 624

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ELAINE
by Will Self

- BOOK REVIEW
WHY READ
by Will Self

- BOOK REVIEW
WILL
by Will Self

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.