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THE UNPASSING

Name: THE UNPASSING
Author: Chia-Chia Lin
ISBN: 978-0-374-27936-3

by Chia-Chia Lin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2019

Unremittingly bleak.

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In this debut novel, a Taiwanese-American family 30 miles outside Anchorage struggles to live after the death of their youngest daughter.

Ten-year-old Gavin loses consciousness after he comes home from school sick, the day before the Challenger launch is broadcast on TV. When he comes to a few days later, his world has been wrenched apart: Every astronaut on the shuttle is dead—and so is his 4-year-old sister, Ruby, who contracted meningitis from him. Immediately, Gavin is saturated with a guilt he doesn’t know how to express: “The heaviness on me was like dread. But what came after dread? What was on the other side of it, once a thing was done, done, and done, and dread had thickened into something solid?” His other family members, including 5-year-old brother Natty and older sister Pei-Pei, treat each other with a quiet kind of violence, and the rift between his parents expands. His mother wants the family to move back to Taiwan, where she and his father grew up; his dad, an insubstantial man who drills water wells and repairs septic tanks, maintains his innocence when sued by a family whose child was poisoned by a well he worked on. The lawsuit, grasped only hazily by the children, threatens to drain the family’s savings and evict them from their home. The novel is full of harsh beauty, both in its prose and its attentive depictions of an ever shifting Alaskan environment, all frigid air and Sitka spruces and vast, treacherous mudflats. Death is omnipresent, from a tree that nearly falls on Pei-Pei to the flying squirrel skeletons the family clears from their attic, as well as a sense of constant, oppressive emptiness. “It was impossible to erase the feeling of the unoccupied parking spaces around us. So many freshly painted rectangles and no cars. To one side was an empty building, to the other, empty roads.” The book's main mood is one of intense suffocation: Gavin’s family is completely unable to communicate, and events pile up, disjointed and without explanation. The family doesn’t belong, the novel makes achingly, physically explicit: not to the community, where they stick out because of their race and lack of money, and not to the land, which is unwelcoming to any form of life.

Unremittingly bleak.

Pub Date: May 7, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-374-27936-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- SEEN & HEARD
Sarah M. Broom One of 7 Finalists for National Book Critics Circle’s Debut Book Prize

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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.