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TREEBORNE

Name: TREEBORNE
Author: Caleb Johnson
ISBN: 978-1-250-16909-9

by Caleb Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 5, 2018

A lyrical effusion deeply rooted in place and steeped in quirky characters.

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A debut Southern novel, like many in that tradition, which is rooted in place, populated by eccentric characters, and filled with a certain amount of gothic weirdness.

The narrative spans about 80 years and starts in the present day, when Janie Treeborne is being interviewed about her life and times. She lives alone in a house on the edge of a peach orchard in Elberta, Alabama, and she wants to tell how she acquired the house and how the history of her white family has been intimately entangled with the history of Elberta. She and her way of life are now being threatened by the destruction of the Hernando de Soto Dam, which has long served its purpose and is now threatening to give way. In lengthy and extended flashbacks to 1929, we learn about Hugh Treeborne, Janie’s grandfather, who helped build the dam. And in another series of flashbacks to 1958, we’re informed about the intermediate generation—especially Janie’s father, Ren, and her Aunt Tammy, who had aspirations to go to Hollywood and become a movie star dating back to when she saw her first movie at the Elberta Rampatorium. The book has no central narrative thread but instead invites us to become acquainted with an odd cast of characters, both in and out of the Treeborne family, across three generations. Chief among these is Lee Malone, an African-American who formerly owned the peach orchard and also became the lover of Janie’s grandmother (and Hugh’s wife), Maybelle, and Ricky Birdsong, injured in both mind and body and attuned to seeing visions of Jesus. Johnson’s prose can soar to poetic heights, though his language is always rooted in the Southern vernacular. In fact, even the third-person narrative voice speaks with a Southern accent. (“You could still do things thataway back then”; “Pud Ward got hisself a new haircut.”)

A lyrical effusion deeply rooted in place and steeped in quirky characters.

Pub Date: June 5, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-250-16909-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Picador

Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018

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.