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ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART

Name: ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART
Author: Ed Tarkington
ISBN: 978-1-61620-382-5

by Ed Tarkington ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 2016

Well-written and observed, though the characters and situations are familiar from many, many previous novels.

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Tarkington debuts with a busy coming-of-age tale set in the 1970s and '80s, with Neil Young as the soundtrack.

Young’s “After the Gold Rush” is the favorite record of narrator Rocky’s adored half brother, Paul, who's 16 to Rocky’s 7 when the story begins in 1977. Paul is a bad boy by the small-town standards of Spencerville, Virginia, which means he smokes cigarettes, drinks beer, and wears his hair long. Rocky’s mother, the devout, much younger second wife of “the Old Man,” aka Richard Askew, resents her husband’s fondness for his wayward eldest, and her mistrust seems justified when Paul plucks Rocky from school and briefly abandons him in the woods for reasons that are as murky as the decision to rescue him. Tarkington does a better job with the vivid picture of the Askews’ fraught home life and the Old Man’s anxious maneuvering to get in with Spencerville’s social elite, incarnated by the entitled Culver family, which moves into the mansion up the hill from his more modest home. Patriarch Brad Culver’s accidental shooting of Paul, trespassing after dark, is only the first of the two families’ disastrous interactions over the next decade, after Paul takes off with girlfriend Leigh Bowman following Rocky’s abortive abandonment. Leigh returns just a few months later, initiating a series of melodramatic developments about as probable as Rocky’s adolescent affair with Culver’s spoiled, considerably older daughter, Patricia. Paul vanishes for years, but his intense, angry bond with the Old Man finally brings him home after Richard suffers a stroke brought on by misplaced trust in Brad Culver’s financial wheelings and dealings. Tarkington carefully lays out his elaborate storyline and sensitively depicts his troubled characters, but it all seems rather pat, right down to the After-the-Main-Events summary that closes the novel by neatly wrapping up everyone’s destinies.

Well-written and observed, though the characters and situations are familiar from many, many previous novels.

Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-61620-382-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.