A rich collection that takes the familiar obsessions of love and loneliness and views them from uncanny angles in ways that...
Mitchell (The Last Summer of the World, 2007) offers readers 12 distinct stories that combine the mundane and the very strange to turn ordinary life inside out, examining familiar feelings through a lens of bizarre and sometimes-magical details.
Mitchell’s stories range pleasantly across a spectrum of genres, from realism to surrealism to gentle, absurdist science fiction. A guidebook advises tourists on the sights of a fantastical America in “States: An Itinerary,” describing a country where New York homes have haunted mirrors, Louisiana is a myth, and visitors to California are often afflicted with a virulent form of dreaminess called Golden Fever. In “My Daughter and Her Spider,” a mother struggles against the distance that appears between her and her daughter when they acquire a giant robotic spider as a pet. Quieter stories dive into friendships, marriages, and a fleeting episode of adolescent violence, laying out events and images with a restrained, precise voice that sometimes flares into graceful fancies and comedic punctiliousness. Mitchell explores the marriage of Louis and Lucille Armstrong and the crushed defiance of a Japanese man faced with the loyalty questionnaire in a World War II internment camp. “Biographies” indulges the conceit of presenting various fanciful backgrounds for the author ("Emily Mitchell was born in London in the middle of a garbage collectors' strike"); the story is made endearing by the way even the most unlikely details pile up to an emotional truth. While the tales have varying relationships to normal reality, they each pull the reader into a vivid, focused contemplation of their characters’ longings and despairs. A few stories drift toward claustrophobic meandering, but as a whole, the collection is exceptionally readable, surprisingly varied, and held together by a striking authorial point of view.
A rich collection that takes the familiar obsessions of love and loneliness and views them from uncanny angles in ways that are magical, cutting, and intensely recognizable.Pub Date: June 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-35053-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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