A familiar plot gets a sharp millennial makeover.
A directionless grad student finds himself at the center of a bisexual love triangle in debut novelist Gregor’s charmingly melancholy Brooklyn rom-com.
At 29, Richard’s life seems to be in a state of suspended animation. He’s supposed to be finishing a Ph.D. in medieval Italian literature, except that he hasn’t actually written much of anything in months. As a result, “all his efforts at maintaining a long-cultivated identity of academic competence and dependable accomplishment had taken on an air of pointlessness.” (Also, his funding is in danger.) His personal life isn’t faring much better. Dating, in New York, is an endless stream of profiles and messages and drinks and promises to be in touch after and very few actual relationships. And it is a combination of these two factors—Richard’s general loneliness and specific state of acute academic crisis—that leads him to forge an increasingly complicated relationship with Anne, a fellow doctoral student. Brilliant, rich, and clearly attracted to Richard despite the ongoing obstacle of his being gay, Anne offers to help him salvage his academic career, and in the process, their relationship intensifies into something more. And then, on a dating app, Richard meets Blake, and if their romance gets off to a rocky start, it quickly mellows into a serious relationship. On paper, at least, Blake is perfect: a kind, successful lawyer ready to build a future with Richard. Except that Richard is also involved with Anne, who is sensitive and hyperanalytical and—for reasons that defy rational explanation but make intuitive sense—accepts him completely. Of course, per the rules of the genre, Richard’s double life must come crashing down, which it does, spectacularly, leaving him to begin the process of addressing the general state of his life. A deeply kind novel—all three characters are rich and complicated and human—Gregor’s plot is less interesting than his biting observations of modern urban life. (He’s especially good on the complicated dynamics of money; it's rare to find a novel that so accurately captures the constant, low-grade anxiety around who can afford what.)
A familiar plot gets a sharp millennial makeover.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0319-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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