The measured prose and care for detail show a promising talent, but the overscripted characters’ lives feel more literary...
Haigh’s perhaps too-carefully orchestrated debut tells the elusive story of one man from the perspectives of the three women he woos, marries, and disappoints.
In 1969, Ken Kimble, chaplain at a Virginia college, deserts his wife Birdie and their two small children. Birdie, a southern magnolia without the steel who’d dropped out of Bible college to marry Ken seven years earlier, is unable to cope and slips into alcoholism. Meanwhile, after a stint of hippie-style wandering, Ken ends up in Florida, where he takes up with Joan. Having recently undergone a mastectomy, the 39-year-old career-driven Jewish journalist from New York feels newly vulnerable and lonely. She never questions the vague nature of Ken’s past or his claim to have a Jewish mother. After their marriage, Ken enters the real-estate business under the patronage of Joan’s uncle, while Joan tries to have a baby despite her doctor’s warning that pregnancy could spur a recurrence of cancer. She suffers a miscarriage, then blames herself for a disastrous visit from Ken’s children during which workaholic Ken shows minimal interest in them. Soon Ken finds himself a widower. In 1979, now a real-estate tycoon in Washington, D.C., Ken rediscovers Dinah, his children’s babysitter back in his Virginia days. An aspiring chef, Dinah, whose sense of self has been marred by facial disfigurement since birth, remembers a moment of genuine kindness she received from Ken during her painful adolescence. After he pays for an operation to remove her birthmark, the much younger Dinah becomes his suddenly beautiful third wife. Fifteen years later, they have a troubled adolescent son and a loveless marriage. But Dinah is stronger than Ken’s previous two wives. She not only survives and prospers after his final disappearing act, but provides solace for all three of his troubled children.
The measured prose and care for detail show a promising talent, but the overscripted characters’ lives feel more literary than lived.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-050939-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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