Book clubs may dig into the many interesting veins here—family, ambition, addiction, lust—but Mean Dad was the motherlode,...
This complex portrait of a troubled math genius and the effect his gift has on those close to him combines a strong narrative and bumper crop of themes.
For his seventh work of fiction, Canin (America America, 2008, etc.) first presents some 200 third-person pages focused on Milo Andret, an only child whose aloof parents give him a freedom he exercises in the Michigan woods. There, he discovers unusual talents as a whittler who carves a wooden chain more than 25 feet long from a beech stump. A late-blooming math whiz, at Berkeley grad school in the 1970s, he specializes in topology, whose practitioners “built undrawable figures in their imaginations, then twisted and folded them.” He also discovers LSD, sex, and academic competition, laying the groundwork for long-term addictions. He gains fame in math and a job at Princeton, but heavy drinking, sex, and the drive for another milestone undo him. Canin then switches to the voice of Milo’s son, Hans, who reveals he has been the quasi-omniscient narrator of the first section, based on stories told to him by his ailing father. It’s an awkward, risky shift that pulls the story away from its focus on a deeply intriguing character (though perhaps a useful lesson in unreliable narrators for the author’s classes at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop). Hans gives his boyhood observations of Milo’s “Olympian drinking” and is surprised to realize how “normal” his own childhood seemed. Yet he also struggles with addiction, from an Ecstasy precursor to cocaine as well as the high of a quant’s wins on Wall Street, which is where Hans uses his own considerable math skills. Ultimately a nice guy, he pales beside the fiercely irascible, hurtful patriarch.
Book clubs may dig into the many interesting veins here—family, ambition, addiction, lust—but Mean Dad was the motherlode, and it’s not clear that Canin’s easing of the darkness makes for a better novel.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6826-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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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