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AN AVAILABLE MAN

Name: AN AVAILABLE MAN
Author: Hilma Wolitzer
ISBN: 978-0-345-52754-7

by Hilma Wolitzer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 24, 2012

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Beatrice Schuyler is dead of cancer. Her widower Edward lingers on Larkspur Lane, ironing her clothes to hold onto a grief-filled connection.

Wolitzer’s (Summer Reading, 2007, etc.) insightful novel follows Edward, past 60 but still vigorous, as he fights through despair, frustration and numbness. Bee was only 57, and their 20-year marriage was thoroughly companionable and vibrantly sensual. With Edward trapped in mourning, his friends in the close-knit suburban New Jersey community urge him to re-enter the social whirl, ready to position an extra woman, compatible or not, next to him at dinner parties. Even his stepchildren, Julie, with whom Edward is quite close, and Nick and wife Amanda, are worried. To end Edward’s self-imposed isolation, those three place a personal advertisement in the New York Review of Books. Wolitzer’s Edward lives as an empathetic character, one to be respected and understood in both motivation and action. Edward is also revealed as fragile in a way only Bee comprehended, psychologically withdrawn for reasons that may relate to a love affair in his 20s that ended with Edward being abandoned at the altar. That first love was Laurel, a flighty and emotional fellow teacher with whom he had a passionate, powerfully physical relationship. That romance, as well as Edward’s meeting and marrying Bee a decade or more later, and the comfort he found in his ready-made family, are presented in flashbacks that give the narrative color and depth. Sometimes ironic, sometimes melancholy, Edward’s reluctant “dating after death” begins with toned and hungry Karen hot to finish dinner and head home for a romp in the hay. Roberta would rather talk about her late husband. Sylvia, 70 and shaped to appear 50 by plastic surgery, resigns herself to Edward’s ambivalence. Lizzie, close friend of Edward and Bee, is eager for an affair. Only after Laurel reenters the story does Edward begin to comprehend the man that survived Bee’s death.

Literary fiction drawn out of the everyday world.

Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-345-52754-7

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
TODAY A WOMAN WENT MAD IN THE SUPERMARKET
by Hilma Wolitzer

- BOOK REVIEW
SUMMER READING
by Hilma Wolitzer

- BOOK REVIEW
THE DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER
by Hilma Wolitzer

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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.