Admirably ambitious, if clunky, coming-of-age fare.
Comic portrait of modern American life from an outsider’s perspective—but first, 80-odd pages about life in Siberia.
Ulinich’s debut gets off to a glum start. Sasha is a bright teenage girl who’s shy, overweight and curious about what happened to her father, a biracial man who left for America years before. More than anything, she’s eager to get out of her hometown of Asbestos 2, where heavy drinking passes for entertainment and the only thing that smacks of culture is the art school in the basement of a decrepit Soviet-era building. A local ne’er-do-well gets Sasha pregnant, but her mother is willing to care for the baby if Sasha pursues further art training in Moscow. A flop as a student and barred from returning home, she signs on with a mail-order-bride service, which lands her in Phoenix. From there, the novel chronicles Sasha’s travels through the U.S. and the motley folks she encounters: Neal, the controlling man who selected her from the bridal service; Marina, the fellow immigrant who helps her escape to Chicago; the wealthy family that hires her as a maid; and finally, in Brooklyn, her father. Ulinich wants to balance serious themes of Jewishness, motherhood and the immigrant experience with more lighthearted depictions of American life, and she does well in scrutinizing the upper reaches of the class structure: There are thoughtful passages about rich, New-Agey Brooklynites and the hypocrisy of wealthy Chicago do-gooders who take Sasha in. But other portions feel underdeveloped and full of airy dialogue, and Ulinich seems uncertain about how much emphasis to give the themes of race and religion. In the process, Sasha ultimately becomes more a sounding board for others’ quirks than a fully developed character. Still, the final chapters are filled with some nicely detailed observations about her two homelands—and alienation in general—that somewhat salvages the book from its flaws.
Admirably ambitious, if clunky, coming-of-age fare.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2007
ISBN: 0-670-03819-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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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