McMurtry's down-home fictions have always been juiced up with side-orders of raunchy charm and beer-barrel comedy—but this time he tries, with middling results, to make an entire novel out of such enticing (yet ultimately wearying) trimmings. Narrator-hero "Cadillac Jack" McGriff is a onetime rodeo bulldogger who now travels the country, in his pearly Cadillac, as a super-duper dealer/scout—picking up antiques and other collectibles (e.g., a load of gem-entrusted cowboy boots), buying at garage sales, selling to the super-rich. His prime client: Texas tycoon Boog, now living in Washington D.C. with gorgeous wife Boss—who fights fire with fire when it comes to Boog's lust for cheap women. (She'll "fuck six famous Yankees for every little pot he stuck his dipstick in.") And so twice-divorced Cadillac Jack winds up visiting D.C., where he promptly falls for two contrasting residents: social-climbing boutique owner Cindy, a freewheeling insta-bedmate who drags Jack to cartoony/gross elite Washington shindigs; and weary, downbeat Jean Tooley, an almost-divorcee who has two adorable little daughters . . . and who shares Jack's love of old, pretty things. Aside from some vague rumors about the Smithsonian collections being sold, then, there's hardly a flicker of drama as the leisurely narrative pokes along: Jack bounces back and forth between his two ladies; he also lusts after Boog's wife Boss (who prefers her tiny live-in Jewish poet) and dawdles with "two fat wet girls on a rubber mattress in a fairly low-grade pussy parlor"; he gets car-phone calls from ex-wife Coffee (who "thought World War II had occurred in the nineteenth century"). And finally, to clear his head, he drives out west—gathering famous pairs of boots (so Cindy can exhibit them), acquiring a forlorn traveling companion (a bored wife). . . but returning to find that he still can't commit himself to one woman or the other. McMurtry does a dandy job with Jack's business doings here: his highway world of garage-sale finds, auction fever, and obsessive acquisition is captured in rich, economic detail. And the quieter comedy (those cute daughters, the hooker conversations, poor Coffee) often scores. But the supposed center of this novel, Jack's romantic quandary, is uninvolving throughout, thanks to the thin characterizations—while the broader D.C. farce clashes badly with the tough-guy sentimentality. An idle mix of charm, noise, and hoke, then: far too long (unlike Dan Jenkins' comparable, modest Baja Oklahoma), fitfully endearing, and especially disappointing after the textured comedy/drama control of Somebody Darling.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1982
ISBN: 0684853833
Page Count: 405
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1982
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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