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THEFT

Name: THEFT
Author: Luke Brown
ISBN: 978-1-911508-58-8

by Luke Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020

With bleak humor and sharp details, Brown memorably connects the personal and the political.

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An emotionally complex story of grief, desire, and Brexit.

When this comedy of manners opens, it’s early 2016. Narrator Paul lives in London, where he shares an apartment with several friends. He works part-time in a bookstore and has a semisteady gig writing two columns for a pop-culture magazine called White Jesus: one on books and one where he reviews haircuts. It’s through this work that he interviews a somewhat reclusive novelist named Emily Nardini, with whom he quickly becomes smitten. Complicating things is the presence of Emily’s public-intellectual boyfriend, Andrew Lancaster, and the likelihood that Paul’s feelings for Emily are unrequited. That’s not the only area in which Paul’s life is complicated: There’s also the matter of his sister, Amy, who has been absent from his life since they had an argument following the death of their mother. Paul and Amy hail from a working-class community on the northwest coast of England, and the tension between urban and rural areas that came to the foreground in the Brexit vote is a very real presence in his life. Paul’s occasionally acerbic narration makes for a memorable narrative voice, and Brown (My Biggest Lie, 2014) pulls off the tricky feat of creating a protagonist who teeters on the border of misanthropic and self-loathing without making him unbearable. Along the way, Brown ponders questions of class and art, creating a memorable supporting cast whose beliefs often come into conflict, leading to numerous barbed exchanges. Looming over much of the novel are Paul and Amy’s efforts to sell their late mother’s house, which connects them to a place about which they feel conflicted emotions.

With bleak humor and sharp details, Brown memorably connects the personal and the political.

Pub Date: April 7, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-911508-58-8

Page Count: 320

Publisher: And Other Stories

Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020

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.