Imaginative, intelligent, cluttered, long on black humor, and just long.
In a near future fraught with violent anti-Semitism, a family Passover focuses on patricide.
Julian Jacobson is surely among the worst fathers in literary history, raising his children with vitriol, shame, and aggression, treating their mother no better. He tried to poison his adoring daughter by giving her food she was allergic to and relentlessly abused his sons in truly evil ways. Somehow the kids got through it, damaged as they may be. Each gets a chunk of this book devoted to his or her perspective; a penultimate chapter full of twists and revelations lets us into their mother’s head. Moses, the oldest, is an actor with a reality show called The JacobSONS! about his life with wife Pandora and their triplets and twins, all boys. Edith is a promiscuous and unhappy professor of ethics at Emory, currently up on charges of sexual harassment. At 38, Jacob is the youngest and arguably the most alienated. He lives in Berlin with a German boyfriend named Dietrich and has documented the family nightmare in childhood journals he calls My Manifest of Meanness and later in his plays, the first of which shares the title of this novel. When the siblings learn their mother has lung cancer and has only a short time to live, they are certain their father is making her last months on Earth miserable and could even be intentionally hastening her death, since he’s been after her money all along. Though they sort of hate each other, the three plan a family get-together at Moses’ house in Los Angeles—nominally for Passover, but actually to kill their dad, which is going to be tricky since Seder at The JacobSONS! will be broadcast live. In Levinson’s (Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, 2013) dystopian 2022, the state of Israel is no more, having been carved up by Syria, Iran, and Lebanon after a war during which the United States stood aside. Now 4 million refugees have relocated to the U.S., provoking an intense xenophobic reaction and constant domestic terrorism. There’s a lot to admire here, and a bit to be annoyed with, too—Levinson is a habitual overexplainer and loves nothing like a good back story.
Imaginative, intelligent, cluttered, long on black humor, and just long.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49688-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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