A serious novel that is often very funny and will be a page-turning pleasure for anyone who loves literature.
A subversively compelling, multilayered novel about the profound impact of literature (perhaps negative as well as positive).
On one level, this is a book about the writing of a book, detailing the experiences that have inspired narrator Sam Pulsifer to compose a volume with the same title as this one. As a teenager, Sam took a tour of his hometown’s Emily Dickinson house. When he returned that night, he accidentally burned it down, killing two who were staying upstairs. Though Sam presents himself as an eternal innocent, doing his best to put this unfortunate incident behind him, his narrative offers the perspectives of others who suggest Sam isn’t who he appears to be, and that there’s no such thing as an accident. On another level, this is a story about stories—the stories that Sam feels sealed his fate, the stories by which we live our lives, the stories we tell ourselves. As a loving father and husband and a dutiful son following his prison sentence, Sam does his best to write his life’s story anew, yet he discovers that, in the narratives of others, arson is what defines his character. When a series of other legendary New England literary domiciles are torched, even Sam starts wondering how or whether he is involved. Rendered masterfully by Clarke (What We Won’t Do, 2001, etc.), Sam’s narrative tone is so engagingly guileless that the reader can’t help but empathize with him, even as his life begins to fall apart within the causal connections of these fires. Sam ultimately forces himself to play detective (admitting that the mystery genre is one he never read), while recognizing that he might well be the criminal he is investigating. Is Sam an unconscious arsonist? Is he the product of a dysfunctional (though decidedly bookish) family? Is someone trying to set him up? Can the reader trust Sam? Can Sam trust himself?
A serious novel that is often very funny and will be a page-turning pleasure for anyone who loves literature.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-56512-551-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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