Lord of the Flies meets The Trouble with Angels in Phillips's second novel (after Machine Dreams, 1984), a grim evocation of the dark, dank underbelly of a West Virginia Girl Guides camp in 1963. Every human being is abusive or abused, and evil can only be conquered through primitive means at the summer camp, which is divided into Seniors, Juniors, and younger girls. Senior Lenny finds herself sequestered in a private tent with her best friend, Cap, far away from younger sister Alma and Alma's best friend, Delia. This is just as well, since the sisters are immersed in some serious dilemmas, and this hiatus from home offers a chance to work them out. Alma, a typical mother's girl (or, more precisely, that parent's emotional captive), is disturbed over her mother's passionate affair with Delia's father, recently ended when he drove off a bridge and drowned. Lenny, only vaguely aware of the affair, is more worried about Cap, the daughter of a mining-company owner whose mother abandoned her and who'll be shipped off to boarding school in September. Ruminating over their problems, the girls hardly notice pixie-ish Buddy, the camp cook's eight-year-old, who harbors his own terrible secret: His father, Carmody, recently sprung from a penitentiary, is sexually abusing him. Evading Carmody and spying on the girls, Buddy only gradually becomes aware of another presence at Camp Shelter: Parson, Carmody's former cellmate and a brooding evangelist who sees the Devil incarnate in the ex-con and means to personally destroy him. As these troubled characters' nightmares and yearnings come together in a violent climax, Phillips switches, in Machine Dreams manner, from one subjective viewpoint to another. This time, though, the voices sound remarkably alike—wounded, impressionistic, confused by homoerotic and transcendent yearnings—and lose some power in their sameness. Nevertheless, a suspenseful and oddly captivating work. Phillips remains a stimulating and unpredictable author. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1994
ISBN: 0-395-48890-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
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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