It doesn’t get more elegiac than this.
Visits to a Civil War–era boardinghouse, a hospice in the Bronx, and the underworld.
“WELL, THAT WAS WEIRD” is Finn's answer when asked what words of wisdom he would like inscribed on his tombstone—by his dead ex-girlfriend, whom he has retrieved from the green cemetery where she was buried and is now giving a lift to...the other side. IT CERTAINLY WAS, thinks the reader of the novel Finn occupies. This otherworldly fairy tale opens with a letter written by the proprietress of an inn in the Confederate South to her sister, describing some trouble she is having with a handsome boarder. One is slightly bewildered, but also relieved, to find the second section of the book transporting us to what Finn, a recently fired schoolteacher, thinks of as "No York," home of neighborhoods NoHo, NoMad (“of course that was where he was staying”), and Nolita (“Didn't he date her in high school? Or rather, junior high?”). On the way to see his brother, Max, on his deathbed, Finn is planning some patter to amuse him, and if you know Moore, you can foresee that this will be some fine patter indeed. But then Finn is torn away from “the bardo of the hospice [with] its trapped souls and the steel beds and alarmingly colored drinks” by a phone call informing him of the suicide of his one-time girlfriend Lily, who had left him for another man but in death will be his alone. The story of Lily and Finn’s road trip and their passionate banter about life and death and love is interspersed with more letters from the landlady. Perhaps you will understand why, but if not you can focus on other Moore-ish delights, among them extraordinarily lovely descriptions of the hues and aromas of a decomposing body.
It doesn’t get more elegiac than this.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9780307594143
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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