A sinuous, shape-shifting campus novel that promises more heft than it delivers.
Two crafty graduate students plot their revenge when a famous novelist abuses her power.
The collective voice that powers this novel belongs to the classmates of Hannah, a quiet but well-traveled writer with a keen editorial eye; Leslie, an outspoken erotica writer who keeps sex off the page in all her workshop submissions; and Jimmy, a brilliant but reserved poet suffering from depression. When Simone, Jimmy's workshop leader at the prestigious Fielding low-residency MFA program, tears Jimmy's submission apart in front of the entire class, the small community is shaken by her viciousness. Simone's criticism pushes an already fragile Jimmy over the edge, and Leslie and Hannah leap into action to prove Simone's not just a bad teacher, but an egomaniacal plagiarist. Zancan (Local Girls, 2015) writes in the third person plural as the Fielding graduates attempt to re-create what happened the year before they parted ways. "Maybe it was because Hannah, Leslie, and Jimmy's story was more interesting, always and finally, than the unfinished novels we kept in drawers after we graduated and the chap books we self-published, that it always drew us back in," the narrators write, considering their continued fascination with graduate school drama. In its best moments, the novel captures the quirky habits and strange personalities of those who are forced to love and practice their art in stolen moments, in two week intervals, during a low-residency MFA. But it also, at times, belabors what could be a powerful story about institutional power and the collective responsibility of storytelling in order to build suspense. "We wouldn't think anything of it until later, though," the narrators insist as they recount Hannah and Leslie's maneuverings. "At the time it was only happiness we felt." When Zancan at last gets down to the business of telling the story, she captures the fraught environment of almost-grown-ups on campus in sharp, unsparing detail and with lyrical momentum. While the clamorous chorus of her collective narrator occasionally elbows the thread of the plot out of the way, Zancan nevertheless asks intriguing questions about power, complicity, and the urge to tell someone else's story.
A sinuous, shape-shifting campus novel that promises more heft than it delivers.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53493-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
