An intimacy and warmth in character and a knowing view of the land are great strengths here: an impressive small-scale study...
A debut collection of ten interlocking stories about several generations of a ranching family in the foothills of eastern Colorado.
Pritchett, winner of Milkweed’s fiction prize, vividly conveys a world where decency and humanity are challenged repeatedly, and diminished, yet still manage to gain small, significant victories. Renny and Ben are the oldest generation—a couple who, in the title story, are living separate lives in separate places on the ranch, having done so since the murder of their daughter by her husband after she came to them for protection. The two come together during an early season snowfall to help one of their cows trying to birth a stillborn calf, but in spite of their tenderness with each other, their trauma runs too deep for them to reconcile. Daughter Rachel had two children before leaving their father, then hooked up with Ray, a wild man with a violent streak they all learned to be wary of, until in “A New Name Each Day” he snaps, and Rachel flees for home with the kids. Their other daughter, Carolyn, learns in “Summer Flood” that her first love is back in town and takes a day off from her husband and family to find him. After a few beers with him, she realizes that the river of her life might have taken her elsewhere years before, but its currents flow strongly in the life she has now. Her daughter Leanne, in “The Record Keeper,” is recording the weights and vitals of the herd at fall inspection and vaccination. Astute observer that she is, she sees how naturally and lovingly the family, including cousins and grandparents, fit together, and how their closeness matters: When an ornery bull throws her dad over the fence, it’s only a close call, not a catastrophe, which the family easily transcends.
An intimacy and warmth in character and a knowing view of the land are great strengths here: an impressive small-scale study of family dynamics.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57131-036-3
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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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