Weldon’s not exactly challenging herself here, but she’s still one of the sharpest, most entertaining novelists around.
A characteristic blend of social and sexual satire from Weldon (Rhode Island Blues, 2000, etc.).
Grace Salt, 55, has just served a 15-month jail sentence for trying to run over 32-year-old Doris Dubois, the ultra-polished host of trendy TV show ArtsWorld Extra who has made off with Grace’s husband, real-estate developer Barley. All three are dismayed to find themselves collectively in attendance at a charity event where a portrait of hostess Lady Juliet Random will be auctioned off to benefit her pet cause, Little Children, Everywhere. Doris lusts after Lady Juliet’s $275,000 Bulgari necklace. Barley loves to buy his new wife jewelry but is financially overextended while he waits for government approval of the Opera Noughtie development in Edinburgh. Grace is disconcerted to find herself pursued by the portrait’s painter, 29-year-old Walter Wells, though that doesn’t prevent her from ending up in bed with him after she impulsively makes the winning bid on it. Their affair steadily trims years off Grace and adds them to Walter; by the time her self-absorbed son arrives from Australia, she looks young enough to be his sister. Doris, maddened by Grace’s good luck, pursues Walter to paint her portrait and drugs him into having sex with her. She’s a classic Weldon villain, from her total self-absorption to her viciousness with employees even when it’s manifestly against her self-interest. (She fires the assistant whose research makes her look knowledgeable on the air.) Most of the other characters are quite lightly sketched, though always with Weldon’s customary cogency; similarly, the running jokes about endless house renovations and menacing Russian investors are amusing but hardly new. Nonetheless, when it all comes to a head at the party Doris throws for Barley’s 60th birthday (typically, she doesn’t know he’s actually turning 59), readers can only rejoice at her comeuppance and enjoy the mayhem.
Weldon’s not exactly challenging herself here, but she’s still one of the sharpest, most entertaining novelists around.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-796-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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