Jones has expressed these themes more effectively elsewhere, but this debut sets the table well for his later work.
A Welsh farmer’s search for a stray cow turns into a darker meditation on mortality.
This, Jones’ debut novel, is thematically of a piece with the two others previously published in the United States (The Dig, 2015; Everything I Found on the Beach, 2016): it’s slim and direct, set in a gloomy-feeling rural Wales, and concerned with the fragility of life. Gareth, a farmer, is searching for a pregnant cow as the story begins, but he has plenty else on his mind, including a downhearted wife (past miscarriages weigh heavily on her) with a secret, a sullen teenage son, and an aged dog due to be put down that day. And that’s just what’s within the confines of his house: a long drought prompts commentaries about how difficult and feral the landscape is, from the ducks that overrun the town to a failed pig farm to moles and cats and insects that seem to constantly encroach Gareth’s homestead. The light in this dark tale—which culminates with a death in the family—comes via its language. Jones writes about this mucky, perilous landscape with a simplicity and passion that evoke Seamus Heaney’s poetry: “The earth was full and hungry”; “When much of the goodness of the mole was gone and the bigger insects went the ants came, cleaning the bones and the lining from the skin.” That lyricism isn’t always to the benefit of the main plot; Gareth’s wife and children are relatively underdeveloped compared to the flora and fauna that the lost cow has wandered into. That makes the novel feel a little more hardhearted than perhaps Jones intends. (Is human death not more tragic than animal carcasses?) But he crafts an effective tension between the hard economics of farming and the earthbound challenges of nature.
Jones has expressed these themes more effectively elsewhere, but this debut sets the table well for his later work.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56689-465-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
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