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COPPERHEAD

Name: COPPERHEAD
Author: Alexi Zentner
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7728-4

by Alexi Zentner ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 9, 2019

A persuasive take on a familiar theme: the venomous prejudices lurking in small communities.

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A slow, gritty coming-of-age story in which class, racial, and family tensions come to a head in one long weekend.

It’s a snowy November Friday in upstate New York, and Jessup is 17, smart, and a fine linebacker who may be tackling for Yale next year. In a playoff game, he makes a crushing hit and scores. But in the parking lot later, the black player he took down, Corson, confronts Jessup, who is white, and terrible events are set in motion that will leave Corson dead and Jessup mired in a coverup that spotlights his dark family history. His brother, Ricky, is serving a 20-year sentence for killing two black men four years earlier when they attacked him because of racist tattoos on his torso. Jessup’s stepfather, David John, went to prison on a lesser, related charge and is just out. The family attends the Blessed Church of the White America, where the elders “have been promising a racial holy war.” The police go after Jessup as an obvious suspect in Corson’s death, and a media-savvy church member sees a martyr who can rally more whites to the cause. Jessup is a likable but painfully ambivalent young man, closely tied to his family yet silently opposed to their racist credo and desperate to escape their trailer home, their muddle of virtues and vile racism. It’s a stretch for him to have a black girlfriend but more implausible for her to not know of his family history before they become intimate. Zentner (The Lobster Kings, 2015, etc.), a Canada-born novelist, has written two literary works under his own name and four thrillers as Ezekiel Boone. His characters here are well-drawn, though the story has some weak spots and his bedeviled linebacker is prone to repetition that can sound at times like whining.

A persuasive take on a familiar theme: the venomous prejudices lurking in small communities.

Pub Date: July 9, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-9848-7728-4

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.