The newest installment in Harington’s ongoing chronicle of the Arkansas Ozark community of Stay More (The Choiring of the Trees, 1991, etc.). This is a world that Mark Twain, or perhaps Booth Tarkington, would have recognized: an insular and embracing small town, despite the conflicts that define it at the time this novel’s events occur. World War II is underway, and as Harington’s preadolescent narrator “Dawny” (who, not quite believably, produces his own version of a daily newspaper) reports, the younger “Stay Morons” have divided themselves up into gangs labeled Allies, Axis, and Japs (“all for the sake of contests, baseball, war games, the play by which we find ourselves in the process of finding each other”). A lot happens in these alternately relaxed and overheated pages: the youngsters’ (all too representative) efforts to organize a town government and elect a “mare” (mayor) fall apart under their inability to bury their differences; local fathers and sons go off to war never to return home; a harmless mule is beaten to death, and a disrespected schoolteacher shows the stuff she’s made of (a very Twain-like episode); and in the novel’s culminating series of actions, a group of soldiers preparing for an invasion of Japan is billeted in the nearby hill country, Dawny finds and loses his first love, and a shocking act of violence shakes the sleepy Stay Morons painfully awake. Some of this is charming (Harington is at his best when contriving tall tales about mosquitoes who “outwit” those newfangled inventions called window screens); unfortunately, much more of it feels forced and miscalculated (Dawny is a little too bright and perceptive to be believed; and the melodramatic momentum of the closing pages undoes the careful pacing that produces many of Harington’s best effects, and furthermore seems to have come out of another novel entirely). Stay More remains an intermittently pleasant place to visit, but it never seems fully real, and you can’t imagine yourself, or anyone else, actually living there.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1998
ISBN: 1-887178-07-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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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