Mildly entertaining, but the plot was fresher 15 years ago in the movie Wall Street, and there’s not a character as...
Krist’s third novel (after Chaos Theory, 2000, etc.) reminds us that there have been other New Economies as he blends his ambitious hero’s adventures in 1690s London with similar events in New York from September 1999 to March 2000.
Twenty-year-old William Merrick, “fourth son in a family whose brickworks would only comfortably support three,” goes to work for his uncle, prominent wine merchant Gilbert Hawking, but is far more interested in “the joyous intricacies of what was then called Dutch finance—that new, uncharted world of notes and shares an annuities.” Will is a classic young man on the make in 17th-century London until Chapter Three, when the hackney coach hailed in ‘Change Alley turns into a 20th-century taxi at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway. From then on, his first-person narrative alternates between the two periods but tells the same story in both. Uncle Gilbert entrusts Will with the nebulous task of helping him connect with companies creating new technologies. Among these is “an electronic switching thingie” developed by Benjamin Fletcher (in the 17th century, he’s come up with a new kind of winch), whose alluring sister Eliza wants “to open a chain of socially-responsible restaurants” (or “a series of charitable chophouses” circa 1690). Will is almost as attracted to Eliza as he is to the seemingly limitless potential for making money dangled in front of him by Ted Witherspoon, a promoter of IPOs (called “projects” in 17th-century London). The dual time frame is a clever gimmick, but no more than a gimmick as Will makes the familiar journey from hungry apprenticeship to unmerited affluence to deserved comeuppance. He makes money, but he loses the girl. This won’t bother readers much, however, since Eliza, is as one-dimensional as the rest of the schematic cast.
Mildly entertaining, but the plot was fresher 15 years ago in the movie Wall Street, and there’s not a character as galvanizing as Gordon Gekko anywhere in sight.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-1330-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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