McKinney-Whetstone’s third novel (Tempest Rising, 1998, etc.) examines a contemporary African-American community in Philadelphia, but her elementary plot and monochromatic characters don—t leave much of an impression. Verdi is in her 40s, her past marked by a brief episode of heroin use in college during the 1970s. Flashbacks reveal that taking heroin was in part a dark spinoff of her wild love for Johnson, with whom she discovered the rapture of souls at age 19. After Verdi passed out in her own vomit in a campus men’s room, her snooty history professor, Rowe, chivalrously took her home, where he and his wife, Penda, nursed her back to stability, kept up appearances for her family, and prevented her expulsion from school. Eventually, Rowe left Penda for Verdi, and they have lived in tense affection for several decades. Now Johnson’s back in town, a drug-free fund-raiser for nonprofit organizations. He never did like Rowe, though he has to admit that his rival saved Verdi’s life. But now that life seems a ho-hum round of scheduled pleasures, and when her cousin Kitt hooks up the former lovers, Verdi and Johnson’s passion reignites. Is it peril or paradise? While Verdi’s torn between gratitude to Rowe and desire for Johnson, her aunt Posie has a stroke. But Kitt’s mute daughter, Sage, sees beautiful colors when Johnson and Verdi reconnect. Stressed out by the whole business, Verdi goes to the brink of doing heroin again, but Sage will rescue her from disaster. Aunt Posie is going to be fine, Rowe is revealed to be a soulless pretender, and Johnson and Verdi get it all back together. The author’s fans will enjoy her extended scenes of domestic life and conflict, and will know enough not to expect the same sort of rapture that Verdi shares with Johnson.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-14995-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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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