JUNO & JULIET

Name: JUNO & JULIET
Author: Julian Gough
ISBN: 0-385-50172-2

by Julian Gough ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 17, 2001

Irish newcomer Gough deftly captures the twins’ youthful awe and giddy excitement during their freshman year, and though the...

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A smartly written, pleasantly conceived Irish variation on the girl-goes-to-college-and-comes-of-age story in which small-town twins learn to adore literature and the arts, fall in love, and through loss discover deeper truths.

The narrator, Juliet, considers her twin sister Juno unbelievably beautiful, smart, socially successful, and immeasurably confident, which makes a marked contrast to her own, muddled self-image. Together, they venture to Galway to attend college, and immediately are engrossed in campus life. Juno tackles acting and falls in love with Michael, an uneven, goodhearted student with whom the sisters share a residence. Juliet, meanwhile, is introduced to the edifying joys of literature, and though no specific books are mentioned, the tutorials of David Hennessey and his teaching style—Socratic hip, with a dose of irony—are evidently rapturous: Juliet falls hard for the dashingly romantic, inwardly sad instructor with a dying father. Meanwhile, the girls’ Christmas holiday demonstrates both how much and how little the two have changed, providing a few secondary characters against whom their collegiate arc may be measured. Later, David asks Juliet to join him on a boating trip to deliver groceries to his cancer-stricken father, but as her feelings deepen, he becomes more elusive. From David, Juliet learns some shaded secrets about Conrad, an alcoholic writer-in-residence with whom Juno has a flirtatious relation. On impulse, Juliet sleeps with Michael, and later Juno sleeps with Conrad. The sisters make up, and Juno discovers Conrad is responsible for the threatening, sexually violent letters that have been frightening her for weeks. David will join the sisters in confronting the sodden author.

Irish newcomer Gough deftly captures the twins’ youthful awe and giddy excitement during their freshman year, and though the plot ambles along fairly conventional paths, its course is stylistically nimble, intellectually unburdensome, and eminently companionable.

Pub Date: July 17, 2001

ISBN: 0-385-50172-2

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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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.