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THE WORLD IS A NARROW BRIDGE

Name: THE WORLD IS A NARROW BRIDGE
Author: Aaron Thier
ISBN: 978-1-63557-141-7

by Aaron Thier ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 3, 2018

Successful as neobiblical allegory; as a novel, not so much.

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At the dawn of the Trumpocalypse, a young couple embarks on a divine cross-country mission.

Eva and Murphy, who live in Miami and subsist on the gig economy, receive orders from Yahweh to hit the road and let America know who is Lord. Eva is chosen as the prophet just as she and Murphy are pondering whether to have a baby. After a stop at Eva’s ancestral fixer-upper, where her Uncle Orson imparts folksy wisdom and racing tips, they pick up a pet, “Fluffy 2,” who is either a cat, a dog, or a small goat, no one is sure which. A homeless woman inspires them with a brilliant scheme to develop “Mount Trashmore” resorts (since landfill mounds will, in much of the country, become shorefront property after sea levels rise). The postmodern picaresque continues as Eva evangelizes at lectures, billionaire retreats, and other venues representing the venality of American mores and the kitschiness of its culture. Her negotiated fee from Yahweh is $100 million to fund operation Mount Trashmore. The only hitch is that she and Murphy must also build a temple to the exact specifications of Solomon’s. As the couple and their ambiguous pet journey on, Thier avails himself of all opportunities to preach his own gospel of What Went Wrong through history, citing myriad not-so-fun facts such as that "there were strict gun control laws in the Wild West” and that one of the reasons Haiti is perennially impoverished is that after the island’s slaves freed themselves they owed reparations to their former slave owners that they never paid. As Eva proclaims the Lord, it is Murphy who launches jeremiads against the circumstances that made America not so great. “How can we accept that the world is the way it is?” is the novel’s overriding inquiry. Thier’s prodigious facility with language and penchant for stinging irony are evident. However, even metafiction has one basic requirement—to evoke pity and fear for the human predicament—and this is where the “narrow bridge” collapses.

Successful as neobiblical allegory; as a novel, not so much.

Pub Date: July 3, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-63557-141-7

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
MR. ETERNITY
by Aaron Thier

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GHOST APPLE
by Aaron Thier

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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.