Narrative propulsion is laced with delicious irony in this winning novel.
A provocative premise delivers considerable literary dividends.
In one of his richest and most engaging novels, Boyle (The Women, 2009, etc.) characteristically combines a dark sense of humor and a subversive streak as he illuminates the dark underbelly of all-American idealism. The focus is California environmentalism, the idealization of the natural world, which is more often dangerous, even deadly, than idyllic. The novel puts two characters on a collision course, with each discovering in the process the complexities and ambiguities of their polarized opposite positions. Dr. Alma Boyd Takesue, a native Californian of mixed American and Japanese descent, spearheads a program for the National Park Service aimed at eliminating various species that have been imported to the Channel Islands, near Santa Barbara, to preserve the ecosystem and allow indigenous species to survive. Her antagonist is Dave LaJoy, head of the PETA-like FPA (For the Protection of Animals), who is both a dreadlocked hipster and a successful businessman. He is also a dislikable loudmouth—ravaging restaurant personnel, throwing his weight around, bullying Alma, whom he once dated. But he has a point: “He believes in something, the simplest clearest primary moral principle: thou shalt not kill.” And his activism has spurred plenty of press coverage that demonizes the National Park Service’s initiative, accusing Alma of trying to “manipulate nature and make a theme park out of the islands.” Nature being nature, it refuses to obey the dictates of either Alma or Dave, as their battles escalate over rats, feral pigs and rattlesnakes, and the plot naturally comes to encompass human death (and birth) as well. A richly detailed back story provides additional context, as Boyle nimbly plays chronological hopscotch, showing how both these islands and these people came to be how they are. The novel never reduces its narrative to polemics—there are no heroes here—while underscoring the difficult decisions that those who consider themselves on the side of the angels must face.
Narrative propulsion is laced with delicious irony in this winning novel.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02232-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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