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ORANGE LAUGHTER

Name: ORANGE LAUGHTER
Author: Leone Ross
ISBN: 0-374-22676-8

by Leone Ross ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2000

Strong and weak, imitative and authentic, by turns.

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British author Ross debuts with a Faulkner-like saga of love and hate in a racially divided South—ending it in melodrama staged with blood, tears, and tricks.

Agatha Salisbury, high yellow, never knew her parents—nor why from her early childhood the white Jamie Campbell became so constant a visitor at the house in Edene, North Carolina, that she lived in with her widowed grandfather. Not until the bitter end will it be known who Jamie Campbell really is or what he’s really meant to Agatha—and getting to that end is a route long and indirect. At the opening, the intelligent Agatha has already gone to New York, gotten a degree, worked as a math professor—and then, on her aged grandfather’s death, come back to Edene. There, she takes on the raising of a black boy named Tony Pellar—a mute, it seems, until events show otherwise (and later, otherwise again)—and for income works as housekeeper for the crabby Miss Ezekial, white and also raising a boy, her grandson Mikey Tennyson. These events take place in the ’60s, when “night riders” torment (and sometimes kill) civil rights workers—and when they threaten even Agatha, who secretly helps targeted blacks escape to the north. Much of the story, in flashback, is told by Tony, now in his 30s and eking out a paranoia- and guilt-ridden life in the subway tunnels of New York City. Why his near-psychotic fears, his imagining that Agatha is coming to kill him? Where is Agatha? What did happen to her 30-some years back? In urgent, unpunctuated passages, Tony recalls his old friendship with Mikey, begins to exchange letters with him (Mikey is now a professor himself), and gradually disinters not only the horror of what finally destroyed the courageous Agatha, but, less substantially compelling, a whole batch of romance-style guess-who-was-really-who’s.

Strong and weak, imitative and authentic, by turns.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-374-22676-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000

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.