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PRODIGALS

Name: PRODIGALS
Author: Greg Jackson
ISBN: 978-0-374-23813-1

STORIES

by Greg Jackson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2016

An admirable debut that cannily captures the difficulty of balancing good deeds with bad behavior.

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Well-educated but rudderless people seek enlightenment in these stories—or at least an interesting trip and a good high.

The eight stories in Jackson’s debut are populated by bright, artistic men and women who are chafing at the adulthood that’s just about to consume them. The narrator of “Wagner in the Desert” joins a group of friends for one last druggy bacchanal in Palm Springs; in “Epithalamium,” a divorcée bonds with a free-spirited young woman who’s taken up residence in her summer home; “Dynamics in the Storm” is told by a man who helps drive his therapist out of New York in advance of a hurricane, and the sexual tension between them intensifies along with the weather. Those characters and others are, as the book's title suggests, people who've abandoned their roots, and Jackson has a nuanced sense of how a change of scenery can frazzle your sense of self. That’s best exposed in “Serve-and-Volley, Near Vichy,” a story about a journalist who winds up in the home of a retired tennis star and how much his own identity curdles as he obsesses over (and to an extent takes on) the athlete’s persona. Jackson’s stories are consistently dark and smart, if sometimes pretentious: Scrabble vocabulary (“salmagundi,” “nevi”) crops up in otherwise sinuous paragraphs, and the philosophizing in the closing “Metanarrative Breakdown” clouds its core story about a man’s visit to his dying grandfather. To be fair, though, telling a story about telling stories is a tough gig, and Jackson is unquestionably a talented and careful writer, deft at delivering a well-turned and effective simile: a wind “forced the trees together like lousy drunks”; a woman observes that “we grow into our toughness like snakes, molting hope.”

An admirable debut that cannily captures the difficulty of balancing good deeds with bad behavior.

Pub Date: March 1, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-374-23813-1

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

- PROFILES
Greg Jackson

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.