THE MADONNA OF LAS VEGAS

Name: THE MADONNA OF LAS VEGAS
Author: Gregory Blake Smith
ISBN: 1-4000-8186-6

by Gregory Blake Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 23, 2005

The author provides first a tragic and then a happy ending, relying in both cases on the readers’ emotions to give the...

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An arch metaphysical mystery from Smith (The Divine Comedy of John Venner, 1992, etc.).

This is the kind of book in which Mafia goons say things like, “What we have here is text and commentary,” and when someone administers a lie detector test, he asks, “Are you in league with the dark gods?” The guy with the dark god obsession is artist Cosmo Dust (get it?), who has had painful experience with the randomness of fate: His adored wife Cathy died after eating an Easter egg laced with cyanide by an unknown maniac. At first it seems that this will be a relatively conventional story of grieving, as we meet Cosmo in Las Vegas shortly before Christmas and shortly after he’s quit his job painting a replica of the Sistine Chapel ceiling for the Golden Calf casino (get it?). His memories of Cathy tell a touching story of love and loss. It’s too bad that they lead into a convoluted saga involving a dead cocktail waitress and Cosmo’s flight from the law with a baby and a Mafia chief’s daughter—no, actually she may be Pope John Paul I’s illegitimate daughter, or maybe she’s the female Messiah that Gnostic Christians have been waiting for. Readers inclined to say, “huh?,” at this point are not the right audience for Smith’s mannered narrative, which really goes off the rails when characters begin talking about Earth and counter-Earth (the former moves from genuine to fake, the latter in the opposite direction) and about “intermittency,” which is “a moment when the old order is discovered again.” All this high-falutin’ chat sends Cosmo and the Pope’s daughter to the Venetian hotel’s fake Piazza San Marco, where in the novel’s most arbitrary twist, Cosmo meets the man who murdered his wife.

The author provides first a tragic and then a happy ending, relying in both cases on the readers’ emotions to give the dénouement a weight his highly artificial text has not earned.

Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-8186-6

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MAZE AT WINDERMERE
by Gregory Blake Smith

- BOOK REVIEW
THE DIVINE COMEDY OF JOHN VENNER
by Gregory Blake Smith

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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.