Sumptuously imagined and fashioned with a master craftsman’s attentiveness and finesse. Brilliant work.
An ambitious sixth outing from the Saskatchewan author who has twice won Canada’s Governor General’s Award (for Man Descending, 1985, and The Englishman’s Boy, 1997).
The search for a missing brother adds a mythic dimension to Vanderhaeghe’s complex plot, initiated by the mission imposed by wealthy Victorian industrialist Henry Gaunt on his sons Charles, a painter of little accomplishment and no renown, and Addington, a reckless former soldier best remembered for his considerable responsibility for a massacre of Irish “rabble.” The brothers are to scour the American and Canadian northwestern territories (the year is 1871) and locate Charles’s twin Simon, who has disappeared during his mission accompanying Reverend Obadiah Witherspoon, who means to convert “savages” to Christianity. Once the Gaunts are thus engaged, the author introduces his lusty, raucous other major characters—all, in their own ways, seekers—many of whom function also as narrators. There’s fur and whiskey to be traded, land to be seized, and stories to be told, by such wanderers as: Civil War veteran Custis Straw, resourceful American journalist Caleb Ayto, and devious tavernkeeper Aloysius Dooley, plucky Lucy Stoveall, who’s determined to avenge the murder of her young sister Madge, and—the story’s most haunting character—half-breed guide Jerry Potts (a real historical figure), who crystallizes in his own nature and history the experiences common to them all, of division, alienation, and rootlessness. There’s an almost Platonic articulation of divisions and mirrorings thus working among Vanderhaeghe’s gallery of opportunists and misfits—who are nevertheless brought unforgettably to life by this consistently surprising narrative’s deft re-creation of its remote milieu. The novel’s expanse is chronological as well, reaching back to the Gaunt twins’ youth in which they shared their dreams and sensed their differences, and forward to Charles’s later meditations on how his great adventure has altered, as well as validated, his life.
Sumptuously imagined and fashioned with a master craftsman’s attentiveness and finesse. Brilliant work.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-87113-912-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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