THE GLORIOUS HERESIES

Name: THE GLORIOUS HERESIES
Author: Lisa McInerney
ISBN: 978-0-8041-8906-4

by Lisa McInerney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2016

This is a colorful, ambitious first outing that recalls Dylan Thomas’ comment on Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds: “Just...

bookshelf

Drink, drugs, and religion are the familiar demons hounding young and old in Cork City, Ireland, where an accidental murder darkens several lives in this vibrant debut.

When Maureen kills an intruder in her home, her gangster son, Jimmy, hires an old buddy named Tony to help dispose of the corpse. The victim, a drug addict named Robbie, had been living with a prostitute named Georgie, who worked in the building where Maureen lives when it was a brothel and who makes a drug buy through local madam Tara. That’s how Georgie comes to know the young dealer Ryan, Tony’s son, who one day succumbs to Tara’s charms, as she lives next door and he is seeking respite from his father’s violence. As the narrative meanders across some five years in a depressed economy that forces many to choose “between the airport and the dole queue,” fate treats few of these players kindly. Ryan does jail time, Tony and Georgie try rehab, and two unplanned pregnancies emerge. Jimmy’s concern that his mother’s homicide will be revealed by Tony, Tara, or Georgie produces a rising tension that leads to more than one ending and two awkward flashbacks. Amid an exceptional cast, Ryan has too many facets and doesn’t quite gel, as victim or rising hood. The three main women are all well-drawn figures, with Maureen a real standout amid so much dependency, a refreshing maverick full of scathing comments on religion and hypocrisy. There’s other challenging language here, be warned, both obscenity and slang, which might be harsh or unwelcome to some ears but also, like the Irish English McInerney composes, possesses its own enticing music.

This is a colorful, ambitious first outing that recalls Dylan Thomas’ comment on Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds: “Just the book to give your sister, if she is a dirty, boozey girl.”

Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8041-8906-4

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown

Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

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

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

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.