Although Lowell and Susan become reconciled, this is a sad, angry book, full of raw emotions elegantly phrased.
Revisiting the 1950s murder spree of Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, romanticized in the classic 1973 movie Badlands, Ward, in her first novel, places her sympathies clearly with the victims.
The author follows three characters at different moments in their interwoven lives. In 1991, Lowell Bowman is a Manhattan antiquities dealer whose marriage is on the brink of collapse. We soon realize that Lowell’s parents were murdered by Starkweather and Fugate in Lincoln, Nebraska, when he was a boy. His wife Susan wants him to go to their former home in upstate New York and retrieve a safe deposit box he has secretly rented for years. Emotionally closed on many levels, racked by survivor’s guilt, he reluctantly travels upstate, not sure if he’s leaving Susan for good. In 1959, Susan is a 13-year-old whose troubled family has just moved to Lincoln. She’s first drawn to the Starkweather story for its adolescent romanticism, but as her mother moves toward abandoning Susan and her father, the girl shifts her obsession to the tragedy of the Bowmans’ orphaned son. While saving her best friend’s mother from possible suicide, Susan at last meets Lowell, and their attraction is immediate. In 1957, Caril Fugate is a dull-witted but conniving 14-year-old girl wildly infatuated with Starkweather, and, as his murder spree begins, she plays the part of passive participant. When she and Starkweather come to the Bowman home, she’s drawn to Mrs. Bowman but does nothing to help her when the opportunity arises. Ward, who has based the Bowmans on her own family, shows no sympathy for Fugate, portraying her as stereotypical white trash. In prison in 1976, Fugate still denies blame, viewing herself as victim. The obvious irony lies in the way guilt stains the life of the victim more than of the perpetrator.
Although Lowell and Susan become reconciled, this is a sad, angry book, full of raw emotions elegantly phrased.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7598-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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