Phillips proves yet again that she is an intuitive, emotionally resonant writer who is willing to consider some of life’s...
The short stories in this darkly absorbing collection remind us of the hope and humanity, the warmth, joy, and love that can be found in even the bleakest circumstances.
One of the many remarkable things about Phillips’ fiction is that, even as she conjures unsettlingly grim dystopian futures, which seem to be an unfortunate extension of today’s urban reality, or fixes her focus on untidy aspects of the here and now, she reveals something essential, enduring, and glitteringly beautiful about our most personal relationships: the ways our families (our husbands and wives; our children) can offer us comfort and safety, humanity, and love in a cold, uncaring world. She did it in her debut novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015), and she does it again in several of the 18 stories in this darkly delicious collection. In “The Knowers,” a story that is especially redolent of Phillips’ novel, a woman opts, over her husband’s objection, to learn the precise date of her own death: “April 17, 2043,” the character muses. “The knowledge heightened my life. The knowledge burdened my life. I regretted knowing. I was grateful to know.” “The Doppelgängers” captures the terrifying wonders of first-time motherhood—the ways it reroutes a woman's loyalties and fundamentally redefines her. In “Contamination Generation,” Phillips brings us a couple trying to raise their 5-year-old daughter with a sense of nature’s joy and wonder in a cement-hard city landscape, a world in which only the wealthy—like the rich family next door—have private lawns and in which the “grass for the masses” at the city’s botanic gardens (reached via two buses and the subway) may be gazed at but not walked, sat, lain, or played upon. This young family may not have a lush, air-purified backyard with a swimming pool, like their neighbors, but their shared love, the delight they take in each other’s company, and the thoughtful things they do to help one another muddle through make them rich indeed. Phillips’ sneakily optimistic stories are all about finding hope in even the bleakest situations. “The thing is, the organism survives no matter what,” the dad who narrates “Contamination Generation” observes; “the organism even thrives.”
Phillips proves yet again that she is an intuitive, emotionally resonant writer who is willing to consider some of life’s biggest questions and offer, yes, a few possible solutions.Pub Date: May 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62779-379-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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