Ingenious. Absolutely ingenious: Wouk’s first fiction in ten years.
At 88, Wouk (The Will to Live On, 2000) writes with the brightness of a 45-year-old kid hell-bent on fun about subatomic physics.
The hole in Texas is the underground 50-mile Superconducting Super Collider built at Waxahachie but closed down when Bill Clinton cut the budget. Astrophysicist Guy Carpenter spent five years preparing 10,000 superconducting magnets for the project, then suddenly found himself out of work, as did a whole raft of fellow physicists. Since then he’s worked on the forthcoming, vastly advanced space-telescopes project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (four scopes floating a million miles out) and has had many second thoughts about what the collider was supposed to search for: the Higgs Boson, an elementary particle or force field that allows atoms to attain mass and thus produce the substance of the material universe. Or something like that. Guy wonders: Was the Boson just moonshine? Then, shaking up the whole field, Chinese physicists announce that they’ve found the Boson. The American military gets nervous indeed: a Boson Bomb would be to the hydrogen bomb as the hydrogen bomb is to gunpowder. Widowed but wealthy Congresswoman Myra Kadane, who is on the science appropriations committee that will keep the wavering space telescopes project funded, pastes herself to Guy to learn more about the Boson. Guy’s wife Penny, a microbiologist, isn’t jealous of Myra but rather of Guy’s old girlfriend Wen Mei Li (now 63), who once worked with Guy. She has led the Chinese to the Boson, and now comes back to the States for a conference. Guy, meanwhile, has been hired as a consultant for an idiotic disaster movie about the Boson Bomb. Worse, when he’s fired as well, the movie company wants back its $25,000 advance (Penny’s already spent it) because a Washington Post reporter has dubbed him the “Deep Throat Physicist” who passed secrets to the Chinese. Then the House subpoenas the Deep Throat Physicist to appear with the Mother of the Bomb, Wen Mei Li.
Ingenious. Absolutely ingenious: Wouk’s first fiction in ten years.Pub Date: April 14, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-52590-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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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