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THE SCARLET LETTERS

Name: THE SCARLET LETTERS
Author: Louis Auchincloss
ISBN: 0-618-34159-5

by Louis Auchincloss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2003

Speedy and fleet-footed fiction of the highest order.

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An affair implodes a tightly wound WASP family in 1950s New York.

Literary lion Auchincloss (Manhattan Monologues, 2002, etc.) takes his razor-like pen once again to the ways and manners of the New York upper-crust of times past. The Vollard clan is about as East Coast aristocratic as it gets. Ambrose, the imposing patriarch, is partner at the white-shoe law firm of Vollard, Kaye & Duer, while the matriarch, Hetty, was the daughter of an impeccably respectable and wealthy Bostonian Brahmin family. As the tale begins, it’s the early ’50s, and the Vollards are trying to come to terms with the news that their daughter Lavinia, or Vinnie, is being deserted by her husband, Rodman Jessup, a rising star at Vollard, Kaye. The news burbles through the stuffy Long Island community of Glenville, where the Vollard lived, with all members of the gossip chain being thoroughly disenchanted: “A champion had inexplicably fallen; they could only raise their hands and deplore the degeneracy of the times. Small wonder that their planet was menaced with a third world war!” Having set up the stifling society in which the Vollards are currently entombed, Auchincloss then nimbly hops back in time to trace the evolution of the family and eventually the disastrous affair, from Ambrose’s troubled childhood up through the rise of Rodman and the sleazy machinations of the firm’s other star, Harry Hammersley (no points for guessing that a character so named would be a good-for-nothing). Along the way, readers are treated to a spiffy turn through old New York society, with all its genteel prejudices and entitlements, as well as some shockingly passionate behind-the-scenes affairs. Although from the title one imagines that Auchincloss is out to update the Hawthorne tale, he—fortunately—avoids that turgid style, and keeps things moving apace.

Speedy and fleet-footed fiction of the highest order.

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2003

ISBN: 0-618-34159-5

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
A VOICE FROM OLD NEW YORK
by Louis Auchincloss

- BOOK REVIEW
LAST OF THE OLD GUARD
by Louis Auchincloss

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HEADMASTER’S DILEMMA
by Louis Auchincloss

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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.