Lessing’s best in years. She remains, in vigorous old age, one of the world’s essential writers.
The dream of a perfect society is the ironic center of Lessing’s absorbing new novel: her 24th, published in her 82nd year.
It’s set mostly in the 1960s in Hampstead, a suburb of London, where protagonist Frances Lennox gets by as a columnist for the leftist newspaper The Defender, and de facto earth mother to a crowd of teenaged runaways and misfits as well as her own two fatherless sons. Frances’s own “dream” (of a life in the theater) is thwarted by the unreliability of her ex-husband Jolyon (a.k.a. “Comrade Johnny”), a lifelong revolutionary activist and poseur whose stubborn devotion to socialism and Communism in all their permutations (including Stalinism) has left him no time or energy for family obligations. Lessing (Ben, in the World, 2000, etc.) energetically contrasts Johnny’s political fantasies to the reality of his stepdaughter Sylvia, a selfless physician who pits herself against the catastrophe of AIDS by running a free hospital (during the 1980s) in the poverty-stricken African republic of Zimlia (which is, pretty clearly, Zimbabwe). The several stories that develop from such contrasts are rather inelegantly cobbled together, but Lessing is after bigger game than narrative unity: The Sweetest Dream is an anatomy of women’s lives throughout the postwar period, and it comes unforgettably alive in notably detailed explorations of its characters’ conflicting (and conflicted) struggles. To be sure, Johnny Lennox is a caricature (though one of Dickensian richness), as are the feminists whom Lessing can't resist vilifying (yellow journalist Rose Trimble, for example, and effulgently absurd Julie Hackett, who detects pro-male bias even in the scientific fact that only the female mosquito carries the malaria germ). Sylvia is arguably too saintly, but her ordeal is made quite moving. Lessing triumphs, though, with both the stoical, sentient figure of Frances and that of Johnny’s mother Julia, a German-born widow whose own complicated relationships to the burdens her son thoughtlessly imposes on “his” women are simultaneously haughty, principled, and heroic.
Lessing’s best in years. She remains, in vigorous old age, one of the world’s essential writers.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-621334-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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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