bookshelf

THE LEARNING CURVE

Name: THE LEARNING CURVE
Author: Mandy Berman
ISBN: 978-0-399-58934-8

by Mandy Berman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 28, 2019

A readable but reductive and rather off-putting look at relationships, whether new or old.

bookshelf

Four roommates at a liberal arts college respond differently to the charisma of a married visiting professor with a murky past.

There’s not much good sex in this second novel from Berman (Perennials, 2017) but a fair amount of bad. As the story opens, 21-year-old Fiona Larkin, who rooms with Liv, Lula, and Marley, all seniors at Buchanan College in Pennsylvania, is advised not to spend the night with a male student who has been accused of rape. But needy Fiona sleeps with him anyway, an ugly experience, typical of the kind of poor choices she’s currently making in the aftermath of her younger sister Helen’s sudden death and her family’s disintegration. (Fiona and Helen also featured in Perennials.) And it’s not only Fiona who arrives with a deep backstory. Lula is a rich, black, half-Jewish femme lesbian, and Liv is the product of a Japanese mother and a wealthy, alcoholic American father who possibly abused her. To this mix Berman adds a catalyst, Oliver Ash, a teacher of literature and creative writing who brings to Buchanan a Holocaust background and his own history of dubious sexual conduct. Meanwhile, in Berlin, Ash’s wife, Simone, is tending their 5-year-old son, Henri, while studying the sexual slavery of concentration camp prisoners. Certain themes, it becomes obvious, are the tent pegs holding up this long novel, which partly presents itself as a saga of female campus friendship but also wants to address weighty contemporary topics. The result is a restless, relatively eventless tale: Liv loses a boyfriend and develops a passing crush on Oliver; Fiona grapples with her insecurities, guilt, and a matching crush; Liv and Fiona take a doomed trip to Paris; Simone faces up to her feelings. The learning curve, it seems, is an often gloomy and incremental business.

A readable but reductive and rather off-putting look at relationships, whether new or old.

Pub Date: May 28, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-399-58934-8

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

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.