A darkly comic portrait of one woman's shattering response to divorce: the latest from an author rightly celebrated for writing witty cautionary tales about the contemporary sexual jungle (Trouble, 1993, etc.). ``It is my belief that we are suffering from a perforated personality,'' says Angelica, lying on her bed at London's Claridge's Hotel, and her other personalities—Jelly, Angel, and Lady Rice—all agree. But diagnosis of the problem doesn't necessarily help resolve the situation, which arose when Lady Rice was sued for divorce by her husband, Sir Edwin, whom she still loves. In short, almost terse, chapters that show the disintegration of the lovely and loving Lady Rice, Weldon neatly gores snobbery, class prejudice, and the nastiness of women to other women as she describes just how shattering a marriage's end can be. When Angelica, a former pop-music star, married the impoverished Edwin and became mistress of decrepit Rice Court, she was happy to give her fortune to the devious estate manager, who used it to improve the house and the family's investments. For a while, the couple was happy, and though Lady Rice observed their friends' marriages coming apart, she thought her own secure. Malign forces conspired to end it, however, and she was summarily thrown out of the manor. Using the only credit card she has, Angelica runs up bills at Claridge's while plotting to get back at Edwin—a scheme both helped and hindered by her multiple personalities. Demure Jelly works as a subversive legal secretary; brazen Angel seduces men, including a musically talented chauffeur; and Lady Rice is too upset to do anything, while Angelica is the voice of common sense. But even modern contemporary fables have happy endings, and so finally a new, whole Angelica emerges with an equally new life and love ahead. An unlikely mix of whimsy, wit, and wise insights that works surprisingly well. Weldon in top form. (First printing of 50,000; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-87113-599-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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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