SOUTH OF REASON

Name: SOUTH OF REASON
Author: Cindy Eppes
ISBN: 0-7434-3799-3

by Cindy Eppes ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2002

The atmosphere of mystery is not sustained very well (the real nature of the situation is obvious early on), but, still,...

bookshelf

A likable and earnest debut, 1960s-set, about an adolescent coming to terms with her troubled family.

Small Texas towns weren’t all as desolate 40 years ago as the one in The Last Picture Show, but they were usually close-knit and somewhat claustrophobic. Kayla Sanders thought tiny Cameron was remote enough—until her family moved to Rosalita, where her father grew up. There, all at once, she finds herself in the thick of some ancient scandal that hovers over her parents, and that no one seems willing to acknowledge. For one thing, everyone (especially her father) is horrified that her mother insisted on buying a house next door to Lou Jean Perry, a single mother with two sons. But what’s so strange about that? Lou Jean is somewhat odd, true enough, but she is a childhood friend of Kayla’s father and her son Charles Dale, at 13, is exactly the same age as Kayla. Soon, however, Kayla’s mother starts bringing Charles Dale to family functions with them, and Kayla’s father reluctantly takes the boy to various father-son outings. It’s true that poor Charles Dale has no father of his own, but then neither does his brother David, who is rarely the center of such attention. In time, Lou Jean’s eccentricities (e.g., washing her hands fifty times a day) become so pronounced that she is carted off to Glenwood Falls Mental Hospital, and both of the boys come to live with the Sanders family. Kayla is old enough to understand that sex has entered the picture here and is lurking in some unusual corner, but she's confused by her mother’s motives: Is this an extreme form of Christian charity, or something else altogether? At 13, it’s easy to misread your parents’ virtues as vices—and vice versa.

The atmosphere of mystery is not sustained very well (the real nature of the situation is obvious early on), but, still, this is a fine portrait of adolescent confusion and small-town anxiety, narrated with a fine, light touch.

Pub Date: March 5, 2002

ISBN: 0-7434-3799-3

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

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.