After 25 years, a new novel from Kesey—a brilliant, funny, heartening tale of the power of love to stomp out evil in the last decent town on earth—proves that the heroic old Trickster can still pitch a fastball. Just after the turn of the millennium, Isaak Sallas, a.k.a "the Bakatcha Bandit," a legendary environmental warrior from the "Nasty Nineties," wakes up in his antique trailer to confront a couple of unwelcome omens from the end of the world. The most deadly sign is the silvery albino Nick Levertov, the bad-seed son of Alice ("the Angry Aleut"), battering the hell out of blowzy Louise Loop. The next day, watching a huge silver movie-company yacht sail into the harbor with Levertov aboard, Sallas realizes that Levertov has come back to Kuinak, Alaska, to settle a score of grievances. A couple of decades before, Sallas, once a CIA flier who won the Navy Cross, had to bear the death of his baby daughter—a death caused by his own exposure to pesticides. The tragedy transformed him absolutely. The next day, he used his pesticide plane to drop a fragrant load on an upper-middle-class crowd at a California county fair: right "Bakatcha." His fire bad burned out long since, he now thinks. He'd hoped to live in peaceful obscurity in this last unpolluted backwater, fishing with the jolly Brit skipper Carmody and his Rasta sidekick Greer. Now, however, with Levertov buying up and corrupting the town with wads of movie money and piles of a designer drug called "Scoot," Sallas discovers that he has the stuff—the love and faith—to drive evil out of town: "Dolls were being set up, and being knocked down. The situation was in progress, and in dedicated lock; it couldn't be blinked and it couldn't be ducked." A wonderful tale for the times, proving Kesey is "Bakacha" after all these years.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0140139974
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
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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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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