A budding talent, Jones has not yet found a way to shape his characters’ struggles into a coherent narrative.
In his first, very short novel, set over the course of one difficult day on a farm in Wales, the Welsh author offsets small barnyard crises with simmering marital tensions.
It’s been a long, hot, dry summer, hence the title. Gareth, the main character, is a middle-aged sheep and dairy farmer who inherited the farm from his father, whose diaries he is reading at night. (Jones uses his grandfather’s tape-recorded memories as source material.) Gareth and his wife, Kate, have a teenage son, Dylan, and a small daughter, Emmy, whose father (we infer) is a farmhand who Kate grabbed in a spasm of lust she has regretted ever since. It was her one lapse, and Gareth doesn’t know. We learn from their interior monologues that Kate is worried about her waning attractiveness and Gareth’s loss of desire for her, while Gareth acknowledges that “his care for her outweighs his want.” Anger ripples through them, though the marriage is secure. Meanwhile, the cows demand their attention. Gareth disposes of a stillborn calf, and a second dead calf has husband and wife yelling at each other; then Gareth goes searching in vain for a missing cow while Kate retreats to her bed with a vicious headache. We don’t see much of Dylan, who’s ready to leave the farm for good, while little Emmy will die, but not today, after eating a poisonous mushroom; this peek into the future is disconcerting and arbitrary. Jones is more successful describing the relationship between humans and animals. There’s a striking scene in which a boy finds the inner strength to put a dying rabbit out of its misery, and Jones’ declarative sentences nail the moment. The day ends, rather too conveniently, with a downpour, and Kate’s new vision of her man: “He is strong and proud and good.” This resolution, though, feels glib and unearned.
A budding talent, Jones has not yet found a way to shape his characters’ struggles into a coherent narrative.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-902638-93-5
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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