The nightmarish aspects of this novel’s setting sneak up on you and linger.
Austin’s debut novel follows an aging academic through a surreal future.
To read this novel is to be immersed in both its retro-futuristic setting and the obsessions of its haunted protagonist. Narrator Wiggins has retired from his job at a museum, and he spends his time musing on the way the world in which he lives—characterized by an abundance of dioramas large and small—came about. This is not a novel that abounds in exposition; it’s not until a third of the way through that we get a sense of when in the future we might be. Specifically, it's at least 300 years after an apocalyptic event; since then, efforts have been underway to restore the world. But there’s an underlying sadness to Wiggins’ musings, which abound with comments like, “Curation too is an act of despair.” And the inner workings of the society in which Wiggins lives include some queasy details: mosquitoes used in surgery, tumors produced to use in dioramas, and a disquieting line about “the birds made up of other birds” among them. Wiggins contrasts two historical (for him) figures: Michaux, “the great dioramist,” whom he admires and who was once more widely known and who can now be found “appearing by consent in a diorama”; and the unsettling Minister Goll, who had a penchant for dioramas and murder—and cannibalism. The end result is visceral and heady: a book that finds the overlap of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan, and the writings of Steven Millhauser. It’s a haunting piece of speculative fiction, a dystopian society mapped from within.
The nightmarish aspects of this novel’s setting sneak up on you and linger.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781950539758
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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
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