Proof again that in the hands of an artist, no plot is hackneyed, no emotion too obvious.
O’Brien (Down by the River, 1997, etc.) returns to rural Ireland for a tale of love, land feud, madness, and murder.
Right from the start the author warns her readers that this mountainous countryside is a place of “fields that mean more than fields, more than life and more than death too.” Joseph Brennan and his sister Breege have resided and worked all their lives on a dairy farm that has been in the family for generations. Enter Mick Bugler, riding the mountain’s first tractor, home from Australia to claim the neighboring land his family has also held for years. At first charmed, then threatened by the big, bluff, self-assured expat-come-home, Joseph falls into a dangerous rivalry that becomes a slowly escalating war of threats, lawsuits, and bar fights. Inevitably, Breege and Mick become equally entangled in a relationship at first chaste, then, for one brief moment, physical. Clearly, things can only turn out badly. In the hands of a lesser writer, matters would degenerate quickly into clich‚s and the twee tones of a professional Irishman recounting the quirks of lovable small-town folk. But O’Brien, who tells her story in a mosaic of shifting tenses and points of view, has the gift of the great Irish master-singers, painting word- pictures alternately somber and giddy of a world that has no secrets, one where guilty knowledge fuels the fires of both rage and love. The supporting cast, which could have easily seemed two-dimensional (wily old solicitor, gossiping hairdresser, dumbfounded local cops) transcends stereotype in O’Brien’s memorably drawn portraiture. Her mastery of tone and register keeps Wild Decembers churning even when it’s a foregone conclusion where all that anger will lead.
Proof again that in the hands of an artist, no plot is hackneyed, no emotion too obvious.Pub Date: April 4, 2000
ISBN: 0-618-04567-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
IN THE NEWS
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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