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EVERYMAN’S RULES FOR SCIENTIFIC LIVING

Name: EVERYMAN’S RULES FOR SCIENTIFIC LIVING
Author: Carrie Tiffany
ISBN: 0-7432-8637-5

by Carrie Tiffany ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 16, 2006

Lapidary prose and keen historical feeling make it hard to believe this is a first novel.

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Young wife confronts her husband’s emotional failings Down Under.

In 1930s Australia, the Better Farming Train moves slowly across the country, displaying modern agricultural techniques and dispensing government-sanctioned advice about practical issues confronting rural families. When the novel opens, Jean, the train’s sewing instructor, is quietly settling into her transitory life. She has made an odd family composed of Sister Crock, who teaches women’s subjects, Mary Maloney, who specializes in dairy cows, Mr. Ohno, a chicken-sexer, and Robert Pettergree, an agricultural specialist who can accurately identify the origin of any soil sample just by tasting it. Jean, 23, innocent and affectionate, is caught up in an intensely passionate relationship with Robert, whom she marries. They move to a farm where Robert can try out his agricultural science. Jean quickly finds that Robert’s exacting dedication to the scientific method extends to her; she is consumed by their sexual passion, but chafes against his need to manage their marriage as though it were an experiment. She is finally compelled to leave, prompted in part by her realization that Robert’s minute factual knowledge of the land conceals the fact that he has no idea how people really fit into the landscape, how they derive emotional rather than physical nourishment from it. The novel, written in the present tense and in the first person, achieves a rare, somewhat unlikely tone, at once languorous and urgent. Tiffany’s lean, controlled writing bears an incredible amount of weight; in a few well-turned phrases, the dusty Australian landscape comes alive, and the author evokes Jean’s fevered, nameless passions with cool restraint. The world of the train, especially the depiction of Mr. Ohno, who sees Jean’s passionate nature before she does, and Mary Maloney, who sees Robert’s limitations but cannot tell Jean, is especially moving.

Lapidary prose and keen historical feeling make it hard to believe this is a first novel.

Pub Date: May 16, 2006

ISBN: 0-7432-8637-5

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006

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.