Quietly elegiac but unnecessarily convoluted tale of missed connections and rotten luck.
A magician conjures abject failure in Wallace’s (The Watermelon King, 2003, etc.) bleak fourth.
Glum protagonist Henry Walker is first seen as a ten year old growing up in a dismal hotel where his drunken father toils as a janitor (after losing his fortune to the Crash and his wife to TB). Henry’s sister is his dearest companion until he encounters Mr. Sebastian in Room 702. An otherworldly man with a chalk-white complexion, Sebastian trains Henry in the dark arts, then disappears, spiriting Hannah away. After a police investigation turns up no clues, Henry’s father reluctantly apprentices him to a talent agent, Tom Hailey, who, thinking Henry will be more marketable as a Negro magician, places him on a regimen of pigmentation pills. World War II intervenes and Henry (white again) garners a rep for magically deflecting bullets and bombs in France. Upon landing in New York Harbor, he’s taken up by an ambitious manager, Eddie Kastenbaum. However, when Henry raises his beloved assistant, and Hannah surrogate, Marianne, from the dead, his career tanks prematurely. In dreamlike sequences, Henry revisits Room 702, trying to parse the enigma of Hannah and Mr. Sebastian. Is Mr. Sebastian really the Devil? Did he murder Hannah? Did Henry kill Mr. Sebastian with a stunt knife? A private eye and the denizens of a traveling Southern circus where Henry has washed up—his magical powers much diminished—narrate their recollections and speculations over an 11-day period in May 1954. The voices of the individual narrators, including the circus proprietor, a strongman and a lady of stone, are as unconvincing as their motives in caring so deeply about Henry, an aloof cipher in their midst. The framing incident, which opens and closes the novel, is the abduction of Henry (now in blackface) by three racist thugs who beat him nearly to death, stopping only when someone accidentally wipes the shoe polish from his face.
Quietly elegiac but unnecessarily convoluted tale of missed connections and rotten luck.Pub Date: July 3, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52109-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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