An intriguing but ultimately baffling rumination on looming adulthood.
A young graduate meditates on his future and agonizes over his absent girlfriend during a long hot summer in St. Louis.
Debut novelist Beachy finds his voice but loses his narrative in the ethereal Midwestern landscape of this coming-of-age fable. The novel is narrated by Potter Mays, a character who falls somewhere between Charles Webb’s Ben Braddock and John Updike’s Rabbit Anstrom on the maturity scale and shares many of their tentative propensities. After graduating from college, Potter returns to his childhood home in suburban Missouri to lick his wounds. After he cheated on his girlfriend Audrey with a disposable blonde, and she cheated on him with a “dirty hippie,” Potter’s first love has left for an extended tour of Europe with bisexual beauty Carmel, posting cryptic notes and mementos for our tortured host. Back in the ’burbs, Potter makes a pretense at normality with a menial job delivering water and falls back into the comfortable routines of life among his parents and the transitional misadventures that arise among stranded high-school friends. The advice delivered onto the oddly detached Potter ranges from ironic (“What happens is you get to a point where you have to let the past go,” says Potter’s father, confessing his impending divorce) to bitingly straightforward (“Be a grown-up for once, Potter,” says best friend Stuart Hurst, having sold his advice to his amigo as an “Independent Thought Contractor”). Beachy’s perception of the doldrums of young adulthood are sound enough but his affected literary style often falls flat, especially when Potter bends so often to navel-gazing inaction. “But what of the aberrations? We half-mirror sons, smudged, foreign. These deviations from values. We who survived only to tarnish the men we admire. We failures, broken models,” muses Potter during one memorable aside at a Cardinals game. Potter makes for an interesting deviant but not a very lucid one.
An intriguing but ultimately baffling rumination on looming adulthood.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-34185-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
