The exposition is cumbersome, and the denouement devolves into slapstick, in DeAngelis’s uneven debut.
Geneticist clones her own grandmother.
Lucy and Gray, lovers and professors at fictitious New Halcyon University in Massachusetts, share a rambling manse with five male student boarders, all members of a religious cult. The house features all manner of arcana, including a backyard labyrinth, an attic filled with the vintage wardrobe of Lucy’s grandmother Mary and a basement containing equipment that both Lucy and Ambrose, her late biologist father, have used for “projects” that have lately attracted unwanted attention from the conservative religious element on campus. Longing to reproduce, Lucy decides on a radical form of do-it-yourself in-vitro. Injecting DNA from a bloodstained apron found in Mary’s attic into an ovum harvested by Ambrose from Lucy’s deceased mother Lucinda, Lucy implants herself with the resulting zygote, which develops much faster than a conventional fetus, necessitating a late-night Caesarian performed by Lucy’s colleague, Megan, in the basement. After a few months gestation in the cellar “sinwomb,” Ambrose’s electric-powered synthetic uterine chamber, a new Mary is “born.” Due to her cell age at the time of cloning, Mary is 22 years old, with memories of the 1920s intact. The usual anachronistic follies ensue: Mary finds the language, dress and inflation of the 2000s unsettling, but is pleased to see that Prohibition is over and that she can still smoke Luckies. A helpful book, Everyday Life in the Twenty-first Century, by a mysterious time-traveler (or hoaxer), brings Mary up to date on everything from neocons to the genetic science that produced her. Gray, enamored of Mary, can’t prevent Lucy from cloning Mary’s husband Teddy, who died in 1944 at age 36. Before long, the local evangelist threatens Lucy with prosecution and murder. He settles for vague threats, leaving just enough time for Lucy to send her creations off toward Mary’s dream destination, Antarctica. A disillusioned Lucy will discover the full extent of her father’s prescient gene-wrangling.
The exposition is cumbersome, and the denouement devolves into slapstick, in DeAngelis’s uneven debut.Pub Date: July 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-35258-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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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