The best new book of short fiction since Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever. Keep your eye on Doerr.
This striking debut collection of eight stories offers several boldly imagined and scrupulously detailed explorations of the mysteries inherent in both the natural world and human interconnection.
People who live close to nature (or attempt to) are the protagonists of “A Tangle by the Rapid River,” an anecdote about an adulterous fisherman who can’t keep either his catch or his secrets, and “July Fourth,” a sly parable of America First optimism wrapped in an amusing tale of a bicontinental competition between US and British “sportfishermen.” Doerr strikes deeper in “The Hunter’s Wife,” a carefully developed story filled with fresh imagery about a Montana hunting guide and the free-spirited magician’s assistant whose inexplicable “foreign and keen sensitivity” to the souls of animals slowly drives them apart. People who can’t live where they’re meant to appear in “For a Long Time This Was Griselda’s Story,” in which a high-school volleyball phenom’s love for an itinerant carnival “metal-eater” is poignantly contrasted to her stay-at-home sister’s ordinary life; and “Mkondo,” about an Ohio “fossil hunter’s” troubled marriage to the impulsive Tanzanian girl whom he brings home, only to learn they’re “leveraged apart by the incompatibility of their respective landscapes.” Doerr’s meanings emerge more subtly in the title story, whose unnamed protagonist, a blind man living alone in Kenya, accidentally “cures” the victim of a venomous snail bite, and is mistaken for a great healer. But even this excellent story is dwarfed by “The Caretaker,” the brilliantly compact tale of Joseph Saleeby, a thief and idler who is uprooted and transformed by Liberia’s appallingly violent civil war, makes his way to the Oregon coast, fails in his duties as a literal caretaker, then lives as a recluse seeking atonement for his crimes and a place where he can belong. This is one of the great contemporary stories: an Edenic myth of sin and retribution, and, just possibly, Doerr’s ingenious variation on Flannery O’Connor’s masterpiece “The Displaced Person.”
The best new book of short fiction since Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever. Keep your eye on Doerr.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-1274-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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