Winner of the PEN Faulkner Award for 1984 when printed as a mass market paperback by Avon, this novel reappears now in hard covers from England. Wideman's achievement, without doubt, is ambitious, earnest, and passionate, and for these reasons it deserves high praise. But the book is harmed badly at the same time by its idolatrous and slavish imitation of Faulkner, which make it a museum piece. Set in the Homewood section of what is taken to be Pittsburgh, the novel chronicles the lives of the blacks who make what they can of their lives there, spanning a time from the new migrations of the 1930's to the backward-looking disillusionment of 1970. Albert Wilkes, jazz pianist and rootless seeker, is the legendary and symbolic foundation, as well as the doomed inspiration, for the lives of the others; having killed a white policeman, he is, after seven years of hiding, but still before the time of World War II, betrayed and hideously slain. Those growing up in the grip and omnipresence of his contradictory legacy include a central trio made up of the highly sexual Lucy Tate, her lifelong lover Carl French, and Lucy's adoptive brother, known only as "Brother Tate," who is an albino black with near-visionary gifts as musician and artist, but also with near-mad depths of emotion and despair, which cause him to become mute (after the "accidental" death, on the Fourth of July, by fire, of his own albino and illegitimate son) and sixteen years later to die, by suicide, under an oncoming train. Many readers, if willing to work for what they get, will be moved by this complex, intricate, and symbolic novel. Others will lament that it is not a new book at all, but Faulkner again, sprung into life half a century later, and talky.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 0395877296
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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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