Not sure why the author is in such a good mood, but it's contagious. Prepare for delight.
A dozen stories spell excellent news for fans of the Bard of Spokane.
Since Beautiful Ruins, his 2012 blockbuster, Walter has won a legion of readers who have been through the backlist and impatiently gobbled down his two follow-ups—a story collection, We Live in Water (2013), and the excellent historical novel Cold Millions (2020). This second collection of shorts is a glorious addition to the oeuvre, with a much brighter mood than its gloomy predecessor. The title story, which began its life as an Audible original, is a mini Beautiful Ruins, including an Italian setting, beautiful movie-star character, and heartbreakingly adorable but benighted male protagonist, here a blue-collar boy from Nebraska whose year abroad involves church-sponsored Latin lessons at a “papal community college” in a Roman industrial building. This. Story. Is. So. Damn. Funny. And almost ridiculously heartwarming. But the same can be said of many of the others, no matter how apparently depressing their topic. For example, the story about a father who must be institutionalized, “Town & Country,” opens with the fact that “Dad literally could not remember to not screw the sixty-year-old lady across the street,” and creates for the man in question an outlaw assisted living center in a seedy, one-story motel in northern Idaho where the meatloaf is still $2 and all the drinks are doubles. The climate change story, “The Way the World Ends,” brings two very depressed Ph.D. students to Mississippi State University to vie for a position in the geosciences department, then throws them together with a three-weeks-out-of-the-closet, very lonely college student named Jeremiah who's trying to decide whether it's worth risking life and limb to march in his first Gay Pride parade. What one of the “climate zealots” says to defend his newfound love of country music resonates through the collection: “Life is hard, the songs seemed to say, but at least it's funny, and it rhymes.”
Not sure why the author is in such a good mood, but it's contagious. Prepare for delight.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-286-811-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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