In a delightful fifth novel, Mapson (Loving Chloe, 1998, etc.) brings her eponymous heroines fully to life and credibly orchestrates their different, necessary squirmings through a year of heartbreak on a New Mexico horse farm. Rose, at 40 the elder of the sisters, is stuck in modest circumstances and frozen in subdued grief for her husband, recently killed by a drunk driver. Her children have left home and left Rose empty, though she flirts around a romance with her boss, Austin Donavan, an alcoholic veterinarian. Meanwhile, Lily, a sales rep in southern California for a surgical equipment company, yanks down a hefty paycheck at the price of her soul, has dozens of loveless encounters, and misses her hometown of Floralee, New Mexico. The sisters meet up again at their parents— ranch, and Mapson, with subtle emotional insights and fluid narration, chronicles their hopes and disappointments over the course of one fateful year. Rose falls for (then rejects) a double-crossing (then repentant) Austin; Lily rekindles a romance with high-school flame Tres, despite memories of the child he fathered (and she aborted) when they were 18. Tres, a former psychiatrist, and Austin, who drinks away his grief over a painful divorce, both come with baggage, but their humanity is not slighted by the author. Mapson spins an enjoyable yarn that doesn—t disdain earned sorrow: the funeral for Shep, the grizzled and wise ranch manager felled by prostate cancer, will bring some tears. Essentially a story about reconciliation and compromise, this warm, frank narrative talks honestly about limits, betrayal, and the possibility that risk- taking will out in the long run over the safety of despair. Mapson is particularly refreshing as a portraitist: she knows the Wilder sisters well and needs no help from Freud to illuminate their conflicted, frustrated, ambitious inner lives. A clean, honest, easy, unadorned tale.
Pub Date: June 3, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-019116-3
Page Count: 364
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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