bookshelf

USE ME

Name: USE ME
Author: Elissa Schappell
ISBN: 0-688-16557-5

by Elissa Schappell ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2000

bookshelf

A long domestic first novel about a daughter’s love for her cancer-stricken father that leaves the reader, on balance, wishing there were less of it. The novel comes in ten sections that could stand, often as not, as stories themselves, and there’s pleasure in Schappell’s way of letting years pass between each installment. In 'Eau de Vie,' for example, American parents tour France with their two daughters, the older of whom, the early-teen Evie, is just awakening to sex. Next, in 'Novice Bitch,' the fast-track New York City girl with split parents having her third abortion, at age 17, will become Evie’s college roommate the next year. The story flashes forward in such jumps’so that in 'To Smoke Perchance to Dream,' Evie is old enough to take up heavy smoking in a superstitious attempt to deflect her father’s cancer onto herself. In 'Use Me,' a near stand-alone, Evie seduces'or maybe doesn't'a famous, repugnant, and egocentric novelist. A summer in Amsterdam ('The Garden of Eden') includes a visit from father (after his first lung surgery) and a falling in love with, then marriage to, a young musician named Billy. In the eloquently observed but slightly forced 'Sisters of the Sound,' Evie half-falls in love with a nun at the convent she’s retreated to late in the pregnancy that she’s taken on as a way to ’save' her father. Granddaughter or not, her father’s health continues to fail as the book, growing into a hyperdetailed saga-of-a-cancer-case, starts to crawl for the reader in almost inverse proportion to the extent that Evie’s loss-of-a-parent crisis speeds up'as this distraught and devoted daughter eats her father’s ashes, has a baby boy, breast-feeds him until he’s three, finds her marriage shaky. Snappy, energetic, sometimes almost supercharged in its writing, Schappell’s is a story, even so, about a person whose love and obsession remain only hers, never become ours.

Pub Date: March 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-688-16557-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FRIEND WHO GOT AWAY
edited by Jenny Offill & Elissa Schappell

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

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

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

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

bookshelf

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.