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LIGHT OF DAY

Name: LIGHT OF DAY
Author: Jamie M. Saul
ISBN: 0-06-074752-8

by Jamie M. Saul ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2005

On the bland side, but Saul manages to insinuate a clean, edgy ending: overall, a debut with enormous depth of...

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Ponderous, quietly affecting debut takes a single father’s grief over his son’s suicide to surprising turns.

At first plunge, there isn’t much to recommend this slow-going melodrama. Indiana college professor Jack Owens was too absorbed by end-of-semester grading of his students’ films to notice any problems with his son and only child—but then came the grim news of 15-year-old Danny’s suicide. The boy’s body was found down by the Wabash River in May, apparently by bag suffocation. Jack is racked by guilt, since his wife, and Danny’s mother, Anne, abandoned the family many years before, vanishing back into her life as a New York artist, unable to balance her roles as painter and mother. Jack and his son subsequently made a kind of pact that if father and son did their best, and made their sacrifices, nothing bad could happen to them. For Jack, sacrifice meant breaking up with a woman he cared for so that Danny wouldn’t be “confused.” Now, after the seemingly senseless suicide, Jack grows dejected and dangerously depressed, but eventually opens up to the kindly detective in the case, Marty Foulk, who reveals the details of another apparent suicide some months before, that of a ten-year-old boy. Jack has little to go by except the testimony of Danny’s friends, who hint at psychological distress two weeks before Danny’s death—just around the time the other suicide took place. Journalist and TV writer Saul moves with excruciating slowness in delineating Jack’s grief, almost unbearably so, inserting along the way memories of happier times, when the family was united and living a bohemian life in the East Village; Anne’s selfish desertion of the family now seems the fatal cruel blow—and yet Jack must endure more grief than he can imagine.

On the bland side, but Saul manages to insinuate a clean, edgy ending: overall, a debut with enormous depth of characterization and sympathy.

Pub Date: May 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-06-074752-8

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.