NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU PROMISE TO COOK OR PAY THE RENT YOU BLEW IT CAUZE BILL BAILEY AIN’T NEVER COMING HOME AGAIN

Name: NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU PROMISE TO COOK OR PAY THE RENT YOU BLEW IT CAUZE BILL BAILEY AIN’T NEVER COMING HOME AGAIN
Author: Edgardo Vega Yunqué
ISBN: 0-374-22311-4

by Edgardo Vega Yunqué ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2003

A Puerto Rican American epic, and a reading experience not to be missed.

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Ethnic pride and multiculturalism are the themes that propel this huge, consciously symphonic novel, a breakout book for the “underground” author (Mendoza’s Dreams, not reviewed, etc.).

Vidamia Farrell, a Puerto Rican/Irish-American teenager moves purposefully between the opposed “worlds” of Tarrytown, where she lives in affluence with her mother Elsa (a prominent Manhattan psychotherapist) and stepfather, and Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where Vidamia is reunited with the families of her father Billy Farrell, a wounded and traumatized Vietnam vet. Guilt-ridden for failing to prevent his best friend Joey Santiago’s death in combat, Billy has renounced a once-promising career as a jazz pianist (when a teenager, he had “jammed” with Miles Davis). As Vidamia sets about to revive his talent and motivation, Vega Yunqué swoops energetically through the entangled lives and histories of several intensely realized characters. Prominent among them are Elsa, who’s at constant war with real and imagined limitations imposed by her heritage; Billy’s stoical black mentor, musician-composer Alfred Butterworth; Vidamia’s white half-sisters, Cookie, on the fast track to NYC’s Performing Arts High School, and Fawn, a hopeful poet cursed by a congenital sexual deformity; Wyndell Ross, the gifted black saxophonist who becomes Vidamia’s lover; and Carlos “Papo” Marcano, from the violence-prone slum of Alphabet City, whose sexual demands precipitate the catastrophic climax. No Matter is melodramatic, hortatory, and redundant; no matter: it’s also passionate and powerful, perhaps inspired (as internal evidence suggests) by James Baldwin’s Another Country. In fact, it’s as if Vega Yunqué intended an anti–Another Country: a book whose characters are too full of life and strength to be destroyed by racism. And its loving, vibrant portrayal of Vidamia’s assumption into maturity will remind many of Betty Smith’s often underrated popular classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

A Puerto Rican American epic, and a reading experience not to be missed.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-374-22311-4

Page Count: 656

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003

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.