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THE TAKING

Name: THE TAKING
Author: J.D. Landis
ISBN: 0-345-45006-X

by J.D. Landis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2003

A gothically tempestuous, not undelightful examination of the anxiety of influence.

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Self-consciously melodramatic tale of a 17-year-old girl’s fateful summer of 1938 in a doomed Greenwich, Massachusetts.

Emily Dickinson is Sarianna Chase Renway’s favorite author, and, to emulate and honor Dickinson, the serious-minded Sarianna quits Mount Holyoke (where Dickinson also studied) after one year to become tutor to a minister’s son in the Swift River Valley. After one more year, the valley will be flooded by government decree to provide water for Boston, and the town of Greenwich will be gone. Hence, few residents are left to fill Reverend Treat’s church and provide companionship to his lovely young wife Una and 11-year-old son. Using allusions to such New England literary forebears as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mary Rowlandson, Landis (Longing, 2000, etc.), evidently steeped in the Puritan tradition, gradually introduces a bizarre, incestuous ménage involving the Treats and Una’s childhood family, the Vears: Una grew up with handsome half-brother Ethan Vear and might have been pregnant with his child when her father/uncle Simeon sent her to live with the handsome God-wrestling Reverend Treat 11 years ago. Into this mystical muddle steps clear-eyed virgin Sarianna, who is charmed by Una’s stories of Ethan—or his spirit—and resolves to find him even though he’s reputed dead. In fact, when he does materialize, a kind of feral boy living in the woods with gruff elderly father Simeon, it’s unclear whether he really exists or just functions as a metaphorical foil for the mad graveyard gleanings of the living. With its archaic syntax and stilted vocabulary (“within the chaste clasp of my childhood bedroom”), the story hinges on the “taking” of Sarianna’s innocence: Will it be done by the irresistible reverend, for whom Sarianna doubles for a younger Una? The ethereal Ethan? Even young Jimmy Treat, emerging into manhood? In any case, Sarianna isn’t as interested in the act as in the act of reading: literary and biblical personages have a more solid presence here than Landis’s own.

A gothically tempestuous, not undelightful examination of the anxiety of influence.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45006-X

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
LONGING
by J.D. Landis

- BOOK REVIEW
LYING IN BED
by J.D. Landis

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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.