Mediocre fare, on balance, despite the few tears won at the close. (For another Oprah-anointed author, see Cleage, above.)
The author of Oprah’s first pick (The Deep End of the Ocean, 1996, etc.) returns, this time with a repetitive and tedious examination of a custody battle.
The tale begins with tragedy as Georgia and Ray Nye are killed in a car accident. Georgia, suffering from a terminal cancer, was expected to die soon, but the death of Ray raises an unanticipated question: Who will care for their one-year-old daughter, Keefer? Of course Georgia’s parents, the McKennas, want beloved Keefer to stay with them in the small Wisconsin town she knows. And of course the Florida-based Nyes want her as well. Soon, though, both sets of grandparents, realizing their age would hamper their custody suits, agree on surrogates: Georgia’s brother Gordon and Ray’s cousin Delia each petition to adopt Keefer. Gordon loses the first round under a state law granting automatic adoption rights only to blood relatives. Both Gordon and Georgia were adopted as infants, and though the McKenna family bond is tight, it holds no sway with the archaic law. So Delia and her husband Craig, second cousins who barely know Keefer, are granted temporary rights until an appeal. The familiar theme of selfishness in child custody cases gets ample play here. Both parties believe they’re the best suited to raise Keefer, who clearly suffers as she is shuttled back and forth for visits between religiously strict Delia and Craig and the arty, relaxed McKennas. Mitchard does well with characters: the charming, slightly irresponsible Gordon, the tightly wound Nyes, even the wild Georgia (in flashbacks) all come to life on the page. Here, however, her story depends too much on the adoption outcome and becomes mired in the sorrow, thick as molasses, that results from the waiting. It takes much too long to get to the admittedly touching surprise end, narrated by nine-year-old Keefer.
Mediocre fare, on balance, despite the few tears won at the close. (For another Oprah-anointed author, see Cleage, above.)Pub Date: July 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-621023-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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