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THE OPERATOR

Name: THE OPERATOR
Author: Gretchen Berg
ISBN: 978-0-06-297894-3

by Gretchen Berg ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2020

There are more than enough quotable lines to fill a couple of reviews.

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Berg’s debut is set in an age when telephones were novel.

If you want to make a phone call in 1952, you’ll lift the receiver and hear an operator say “Number, please.” And if you live in Wooster, Ohio, that operator might well be Vivian Dalton. She’ll listen in on your conversation even though she knows she shouldn’t, always hoping to hear “something scandalous.” Her Pawpy had advised “Just don’t get caught,” but her dead granny’s advice (ignored) was better: “Be careful what you wish for.” Vivian wishes for gossip about rich Betty Miller, whose “life was always perfectly in place,” but Betty has a delicious secret about Edward Dalton that’s sure to ruin Vivian’s life. Vivian never finished high school and frets that her bright teenage daughter, Charlotte, will exceed her in life. The narrative is sprinkled with dictionary definitions of fancy words Vivian doesn’t know, like “privy” and “myriad.” She thinks the school has assigned pornography to Charlotte when she sees The Myth of Sisyphus and thinks it’s about syphilis. Meanwhile, Betty is ever so full of herself because her father owns a bank and the ladies of Wooster always accept her written invitations. She briefly considers calling her Christmas party “Savior’s Celebratory Soirée.” Then she hosts a special afternoon tea to reveal the news about Vivian’s husband to a group of ladies “well versed in the art of displaying false concern.” Berg’s storytelling is warm, sympathetic, and witty—Vivian's "fear had eaten her common sense like it was a casserole,” and her “rage had melted and cooled a little into a hardened shell of shame and humiliation.” Vivian hires a private investigator to look into her husband’s past and consequently deletes chocolate from all her recipes. (Well, it makes sense to her.)

There are more than enough quotable lines to fill a couple of reviews.

Pub Date: March 10, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-06-297894-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.